Idiom Guess

How to play Idiom Guess (猜成语)

Idiom Guess is a daily Chinese vocabulary puzzle built around chengyu, the compact four-character idioms that carry a whole story or moral in just four syllables. Every player around the world gets the exact same secret idiom on the same UTC calendar day, chosen from an original, hand-built list of well-known chengyu. You are given three clues — the idiom’s pinyin with tones, a short English gloss of its meaning, and its very first character revealed for free — and your job is to identify the remaining three characters and tap them, in the correct order, out of a shuffled twelve-character grid that mixes the real answer with eight decoy characters pulled from other idioms. It is a quick, satisfying daily ritual: one puzzle, a handful of taps, and a fresh four-character mystery again tomorrow.

The goal

Identify all four characters of today’s hidden idiom, in the correct left-to-right order, using as few wrong taps and as few extra hints as possible. You have six wrong taps before the puzzle is lost, and every correct tap locks that position in permanently — there is no way to accidentally undo progress you have already made.

Your three starting clues

• Pinyin with tone marks for all four syllables — read it aloud in your head to help recognise which character sounds match at each position.
• A short English gloss of what the idiom means — useful for narrowing down familiar idioms you may already half-remember.
• The idiom’s first character is revealed automatically and free of charge, so you always start the puzzle already one character ahead.

The rules

• Tap grid tiles in strict left-to-right order: your very next tap must always be the correct character for the next unsolved position, never a later one out of sequence.
• The 12-tile grid mixes the idiom’s own four characters (shuffled to random grid positions) with eight decoy characters drawn from other idioms’ characters, so nothing on the board is a random symbol — every decoy is a real hanzi that could plausibly belong to some chengyu, just not this one, at this position.
• An incorrect tap flashes red and counts against your six total attempts; the tile stays on the board and can be tried again later if you like, but a correct tap is removed from consideration by graying out once used.
• The puzzle ends the moment you correctly complete all four positions (a win) or reach six wrong taps (a loss), and a loss always reveals the full answer.

The daily puzzle

Idiom Guess has exactly one puzzle per UTC calendar day, chosen by a shared date-based seed so every player on Earth — regardless of time zone — is solving the identical idiom with the identical decoy grid. The countdown shown above the clues counts down to the next UTC midnight, when a brand-new idiom takes over. Your progress on today’s puzzle is saved on this device, so leaving and returning keeps your attempts and hints exactly where you left them; you cannot replay today’s puzzle for a better score once it is finished.

How scoring works

You start at a base of 6000 points. Every wrong tap costs 500 points, and every extra hint you request costs 1000 points, with the total never allowed to drop below a floor of 100 points for any completed win. A perfect, hint-free solve therefore scores the full 6000; a solve after a couple of misclicks or one extra hint still scores comfortably, while a scraped-through solve near your attempt or hint limit still banks the guaranteed minimum. Losing the puzzle (six wrong taps) submits nothing to the leaderboard.

Strategy tips

• Say the pinyin syllables out loud (or in your head) one at a time — matching a sound to a character on the grid is often faster than trying to recall the idiom’s meaning first.
• Use the English hint to recall the whole idiom if you half-know it, then work out the exact characters position by position rather than guessing blindly across the grid.
• Save the extra-hint button for when you are genuinely stuck rather than using it early — each one costs a full 1000 points, more than two wrong taps combined.

Frequently asked questions