Today's Contexto answer — unlocked one hint at a time.
Work through the hints below in order, or skip straight to the reveal if you're just
here to confirm a guess. Looking for an older puzzle instead? The
full archive is searchable by date or game number.
Spoiler-safe hints
Each hint gives away a little more. Reveal only as many as you need.
1Letter count
— locked —
2First letter
— locked —
3Category
— locked —
4One-line definition
— locked —
mold
Game #1434 · August 22, 2026
Why this word is a tough one
A quick read on today's puzzle — not a generic template, written fresh each day.
Mold splits between two unrelated senses — household fungus and a shaping tool — and the neighbor list shows both: mildew and fungus on one side, plastic and silicone on the other. Committing to just the fungus meaning, or just the tool meaning, only covers half the map.
Alternating between grime words and manufacturing words is the efficient move. Whichever side produces movement tells you which meaning the puzzle is actually built around today.
Last 5 days
For anything further back, the archive covers every logged puzzle.
The part most guides skip — this is what the color and number next to your guess is
telling you.
Rank, not correctness
Every guess gets a number based on semantic distance from the answer, not
whether it's "right." Rank 1 is the word itself.
Usage, not category
The model groups words by how they're used together in text, so a same-category
word can still rank far away if it's rarely used in the same context.
Jumps are clues
A big rank improvement between two guesses tells you which direction to keep
guessing in — that's more useful than the number itself.
FAQ
When does a new Contexto puzzle unlock?
At local midnight in your time zone. There's one shared word worldwide, so times just differ by when
your clock hits midnight.
Do the hints above change if I refresh the page?
No — hints and the answer are locked to today's puzzle (#1434) until the next one
unlocks. Reloading won't reshuffle them.
I want yesterday's or an older answer — where do I go?
The archive holds every puzzle we've logged, searchable by
date or game number, along with some patterns across past answers.
Steve Mitchel
Full Stack Developer & Word Game Creator
8+ Years Experience
Word Game Specialist
Open Source Contributor
I'm a full stack developer with a focus on interactive web applications. My work lives at the intersection of
language, logic, and interface design — which is why word games and text-processing tools have become my
specialty.
I enjoy working on both the client and server side, building systems that feel fast, reliable, and intuitive.
Every project I ship is carefully considered from architecture to animation.
When I'm not coding, I'm probably solving a crossword or reading about linguistics.
