Squeeze

Squeeze is a word ladder in reverse. You start with one long word and remove a letter at a time, and every step has to be a real word. Go as far as you can.

How it works

Everyone gets the same starting word, usually six to nine letters long. Tap any letter to remove it. The letters that are left keep their order.

If removing that letter doesn't leave a real word, the press shakes and nothing changes, so a wrong tap costs you nothing. When no letter can come out any more, the round is over.

Your score is the number of words in your chain, counting the starting word. Par is the longest chain anyone could make from today's word, worked out ahead of time by a computer.

The catch

There's no undo. Several letters can usually come out first, but some of those words lead to dead ends a step or two later. The puzzle is spotting which.

The dictionary

Squeeze uses a list of common English words. Plurals and verb endings like -ED and -ING count, but names, abbreviations and rare Scrabble words don't. The only one-letter words are A and I.

Example

PLANETS can become PLANET, then PLANE, PLAN, PAN, AN and A: seven words, the most a seven-letter word can give.

Take the T out first instead and you get PLANES, then LANES, then LANE, and LANE has no letter left to give. That's a chain of four.

Tips

1Short words are the bottleneck. Think about which three-letter word you're heading for.
2Words ending in -S often have an easy first move. That isn't always the best one.
3A and I are the only one-letter words, so a chain to the very end has to pass through a word like AN, AT, IN or IT.