A daily Chinese-idiom puzzle: guess today’s four-character 成语 in six tries — everyone in the world gets the same idiom (it changes at 00:00 UTC). Each guess scores every character as right-spot / wrong-spot / not-in-idiom. ~30,000-idiom dictionary, streak tracking, and a shareable result card. Browser-only; nothing stored.
Daily Idiom Puzzle (每日成语)
Guess today’s four-character idiom in 6 tries
How to play
Enter a four-character idiom
There is one idiom to guess today, the same for everyone worldwide. Type any four-character 成语 you think might be it and press “Guess”. It must be a real idiom from the ~30,000-entry dictionary.
Read the per-character clues
After each guess, every character is scored in one of three colours: orange = right character in the right position; blue = the character is in the answer but in a different position; grey = the character is not in the answer. Narrow it down from there.
Solve within six tries
You get six guesses. A new idiom appears, and the board resets, at 00:00 UTC each day. Stuck? Tap “Hint” to reveal the answer’s meaning (not the characters) to jog your memory.
Share your result
When you finish, copy the three-colour grid as text to send friends (it never spoils the answer), or download a result card. Your streak is kept in your browser.
Daily Idiom: one Chinese-idiom puzzle, shared by the whole world
Daily Idiom is a once-a-day guessing game for four-character Chinese idioms (成语). It borrows the format of the globally popular “guess-the-word” games, but the answer is a 成语: each day, players everywhere face the same four-character idiom, and you have six tries to crack it. Because everyone gets the same puzzle, posting your “solved in N” afterwards becomes a fun social moment — which is exactly why daily games like this are so habit-forming and bring people back every day.
How to read the three colours
After each guess, every character is given a colour. Orange means the character is in the answer and in exactly the right position; blue means the character is in the answer but you placed it in the wrong spot; grey means the character isn’t in today’s answer at all. As in the English word games, repeated characters are handled correctly: if a character appears only once in the answer but you use it in two places, only the “more correct” position lights up. Eliminating possibilities with those three colours, you can usually pin down the answer in a handful of guesses.
“One puzzle, guessed by the whole world at once — that is the magic of a daily game.”
How the answer is chosen: same for everyone, fully deterministic
People often wonder why they and a friend on the other side of the planet get the same idiom today. The answer isn’t random. The tool takes about 400 common idioms and shuffles them with a fixed permutation (identical on every device), then indexes into it by the UTC day number — so on a given day, anyone, on any device, gets the same idiom; at 00:00 UTC the index advances and the puzzle rolls over automatically. There are no random numbers and no server involved; the answer simply lives inside the page script you downloaded (just like comparable games), which is what makes the game fully offline, instant, and reproducible. Your guesses are validated against a dictionary of roughly 30,000 four-character idioms, and to keep things fair the daily answer is only ever drawn from the most common idioms — never an obscure one chosen to stump you.
Learn idioms along the way — and keep your privacy
To “have a guess”, you actively recall idioms, and that goal-driven retrieval cements them in memory far better than rote learning — many people treat it as a small daily Chinese-language workout. When you’re stuck, “Hint” reveals the answer’s meaning rather than its characters, nudging your memory without spoiling it. Your streak and game progress live only in your own browser’s local storage — never uploaded to a server, never collecting any personal information. Simplified and Traditional both work: in the Traditional interface, the puzzle and your input are converted between the two automatically.
10 Facts about Idioms & Daily Puzzles
The vast majority of Chinese idioms are exactly four characters — compact and structured — and each often distils a whole story or lesson, which is what makes them perfect for a four-cell puzzle.
Chinese is estimated to have over 50,000 idioms, but only a few thousand are in everyday use. This game draws answers from the most common ones, with a validation dictionary of about 30,000.
The “one puzzle a day, same for everyone” format was popularised by an English word game that went viral in 2021, proving that a daily, shared, limited-guess, shareable puzzle is a powerful reason to return.
The answer updates at 00:00 UTC, so players in Asia usually get a new puzzle in their afternoon and players in the Americas in their morning — global sync relies on UTC.
The game is fully deterministic with no randomness: the answer is fixed by a constant shuffle plus the day’s date number, so anyone can compute any day’s answer — which is what guarantees everyone shares the puzzle.
The colour clues handle repeated characters by the same rule as the English word games: a character is highlighted at most as many times as it actually appears in the answer, to avoid misleading you.
Idiom chaining, guess-the-idiom-from-a-picture, idiom fill-in-the-blank… idiom games have a long history in the Chinese world; a daily idiom guess marries that tradition with the modern daily-game mechanic.
The shareable grid contains only colours, not letters, so posting your result never spoils the day’s answer — a key design reason these games spread so fast on social media.
Guessing with idioms is also an efficient way to learn: to narrow the field you rapidly search your memory for many idioms, and that active recall sticks far better than passive reading.
The game runs entirely in your browser; the idiom data is fetched once then cached, with no further server requests — your guesses and streak never leave your device.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The answer is fully deterministic with no randomness: the tool shuffles about 400 common idioms with a fixed permutation (identical on every device), then picks one using the UTC day number. So on a given day, anyone on any device gets the same idiom, and it rolls over automatically at 00:00 UTC.
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Orange = right character in the right position; blue = the character is in the answer but in the wrong position; grey = the character is not in today’s answer. Repeated characters are highlighted only as many times as they appear in the answer.
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The validation dictionary now holds about 30,000 four-character idioms, so almost any real idiom is accepted. Chinese has over 50,000 in total, so a very rare one may still be absent — just try a more common one.
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No. To keep it fair, the daily answer is only ever drawn from the most common idioms (about 400 hand-picked familiar ones). The larger dictionary is used only to check whether your guesses are valid words.
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Yes. In the Traditional interface the board and clues display in Traditional, and you can type Traditional characters — the tool converts between Traditional and Simplified before matching, so it works whichever you’re used to.
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Not directly. Hint shows only the meaning of today’s idiom to jog your memory toward which idiom it is, without spelling out the idiom itself. Whether and when to use it is up to you.
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No. The shared grid is only colours, no text — it shows how many tries you took and how close each row was, but not which idiom it was. That is exactly why these games are so shareable.
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Only in your own browser’s local storage — never uploaded to a server. Switching devices or clearing your browser data resets them. We collect no personal information; the whole game runs locally.
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Yes. A streak requires solving on consecutive days: miss a day, or fail to solve, and the streak resets to zero, starting again from your next win. That gentle mechanic is part of what brings you back daily.
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No. Idiom Chain links a new idiom from the last character of the previous one; Daily Idiom asks you to guess a hidden idiom using the three-colour clues. Both use idioms but play completely differently — you can enjoy both.
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