Every English word is a fossil. Rootles is a set of six daily games about the hidden roots of English — cut a word into its ancient pieces, trace each part to the language that made it, or coin brand-new words from old parts. A fresh puzzle every day (Saturdays rest). Pick one.
What you'll learn
English is a mongrel language, layered over fifteen centuries: a Germanic core from Old English, a blunt Norse overlay from the Vikings, a French ruling class after 1066, and endless learned borrowings from Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Each layer leaves fingerprints you can learn to read — ph is almost always Greek, -tion is Latin, sk- is Norse. Play a few days and you start seeing the history inside ordinary words: window is Norse for "wind-eye," muscle is Latin for "little mouse," dinosaur is Greek for "terrible lizard."
Six games, one idea
Each game trains a different way of seeing the same underlying structure. Grow, the daily flagship, plants one ancient root — say Latin manus, "hand" — and asks you to find the English words that grew from it: easy ones like manual, then the disguised descendants like manoeuvre (hand-work), manufacture ("to make by hand"), and amanuensis. Dig works the opposite direction: it hands you a finished word and asks you to cut it at the right joints and name what each piece meant. Germinate is about provenance — colour every part of a word with the language it sprang from, and discover that television is half Greek, half Latin, or that beautiful is French wearing an Old English tail.
Graft and Branch are for pattern-hunters: Graft asks you to hop between words by the roots they secretly share (fracture to infringe — both Latin frangere, "to break"), while Branch has you trace a word's full journey from its Proto-Indo-European ancestor down through Germanic or Latin into modern English. And Mint flips the whole thing into play: given real Greek and Latin combining-forms, coin words that don't exist yet — built correctly by the same classical rules that gave us telephone and monarchy.
Where the etymologies come from
The etymologies aren't guessed. The daily Grow root is checked directly against Wiktionary — every one of its roots has been verified entry by entry — and each answer across the games links straight to its Wiktionary page, so you can follow the trail yourself (or catch a mistake). The rest of the word data is built from openly licensed sources and cross-referenced with Wiktionary, and it takes care with the traps etymologists care about: false friends that look related but aren't (salary is from Latin sal, "salt" — not salire, "to leap," like salient), and cousins that share a distant ancestor but travelled different roads (airport belongs to Latin portus, "harbor," not portare, "to carry," though the two are ancient siblings). Getting these distinctions right is half the point — if one's wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.
How the daily rhythm works
One puzzle per game per day, the same for everyone — so you can compare results with friends without spoilers. The week ramps like a good crossword: gentler puzzles on Monday, the toughest on Sunday, and a rest day on Saturday. Yesterday's Dig words retire into the word archive, where each one is laid out piece by piece with its literal reading — a slowly growing reference of what ordinary English words secretly say. If you want the fundamentals first, the field guide maps the six strata of English: where each layer came from, when it arrived, and the spelling fingerprints that give it away.