Daily Brains · one Latin or Greek root a day — grow it into real words.
Root & Stem is the word-building puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Each day a single root sits in the soil at the foot of a plant — SPECT (look), PORT (carry), GRAPH (write) and 161 more — with a handful of prefix leaves and suffix petals around it. Snap the pieces together to grow real English words that contain the root: IN + SPECT + OR makes INSPECTOR. Every word you find sprouts a flower on the plant and shows its meaning, and the longer the word, the bigger the bloom. Everyone in the world gets the same root and the same hidden list each day.
STORY & LORE
Why roots
A large share of English vocabulary is built from Latin and Greek parts. Once you know that SPECT means 'look', words like spectator, retrospective and circumspect stop being strangers. Root & Stem turns that into a daily habit: one root, its meaning and origin up front, and a garden of its descendants to uncover.
The garden
The plant is the scoreboard. Each hidden word owns a bud on the stem, shortest at the bottom and longest at the crown. Short words (up to 6 letters) open as daisies, medium words (7–9) as pink blooms, long words (10+) as sunflowers. A hinted word carries a blue water drop. Find every word and the sun comes out for a full bloom.
HOW IT PLAYS
Building words
Tap prefix leaves (green), the root (brown) and suffix petals (yellow) in order, then press Grow. Pieces can be reused, and a root may have spelling variants that appear as separate root tiles (SCRIBE / SCRIPT, VERT / VERS / VERSE). On a keyboard you can type the word instead: Enter grows, Backspace undoes, Esc clears. The bare root on its own does not count.
The hidden list
Today's targets are every word in the root's garden that today's pieces can spell, so nothing you can build from the tray and that is on the list is ever left out. The counter under the plant shows how many short, medium and long words remain. Words are stored hashed in the page, so the list cannot be read from the source; meanings unlock as you find them, and the missed words are revealed when the day ends.
Difficulty through the week
Monday · Gentle deals 7 words from a friendly root using its commonest words. Tuesday · Easy deals about 9, Wednesday · Steady 9, Thursday · Tricky 11, Friday · Tough 13, Saturday · Hard 14 from the richest roots, and Sunday · Fiendish up to 22 words, including long ones, with extra decoy pieces in the tray from Wednesday on.
Scoring, hints and streaks
Points are the letters you have grown, scaled to 1000 for the whole garden. Up to three 💧 hints a day each reveal the length, first piece and meaning of one hidden word; that word then scores half. Growing at least half of the garden counts as a win for your streak; growing all of it without a hint is a perfect day. Press Finish (twice to confirm) to end the day early.
Share line
The share line names the puzzle number, the root and your count, then shows one emoji per hidden word from longest to shortest: 🌻 long, 🌷 medium, 🌼 short, 💧 hinted, 🟫 still in the soil. It never spells out a word.
THE WEEK
| Day | Level | Root tier | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | Friendly | 7 |
| Tuesday | Easy | Friendly | 8–9 |
| Wednesday | Steady | Middle | 8–9 |
| Thursday | Tricky | Middle | 10–11 |
| Friday | Tough | Middle | 12–13 |
| Saturday | Hard | Deep | 13–14 |
| Sunday | Fiendish | Deep | 15–22 |
THE GARDEN IN NUMBERS
| Item | Count |
|---|---|
| Roots | 164 (55 friendly, 55 middle, 54 deep) |
| Words with meanings | 3,012 |
| Distinct daily gardens before the first repeat | 383 (#25 to #407) |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Grow half of a garden | 15 Tickets |
| Full garden, no hints (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| First Sprout (first win) | 🌱 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Full Bloom (perfect day) | 💐 Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Green Thumb (3-day streak) | 🪴 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Gardener (7-day streak) | 🌻 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Etymologist (30-day streak) | 🌳 Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains: 164 Latin and Greek roots and 3,012 words, each with a short meaning.
- Weekday difficulty ramp from Monday · Gentle (7 words) to Sunday · Fiendish (up to 22).
- Hashed word list, three water-drop hints, streaks, statistics and an emoji share line.