Find the Right Word – Tangled Roots

Challenges your vocabulary! 

It’s not all that often that we stumble upon an app that actually brings intelligent value to one’s life. Most apps cater to enthusiasts’ needs to be entertained, challenged or engage in some battle; usually allowing the player to experience situations much unlike their normal day-to-day life. However, every once in a while, either through suggestions from friends or by random juncture, you do find an app that makes the most of your time and exercises your brain in a way that is beneficial and fun at the same time.

So, now you are asking, what app would that be? The clever blokes over at EnergyDams have created a neat app that tests your wits on words. Their app is called Tangled Roots and, in a nutshell, it’s a game that tests your ability to list as many English words you can think of, based on a root they give you. As an example, let’s say you are given the root “vac”. The screen will pop up with the root, an input window, and a collection window of all your successful entries. This page will also show how many words they are expecting. Simply type in a word and select “TRY”. If the word you enter truly derives from the root, you’ll get a “Great!”, it will be added to collection window, and the expected count of words will reduce by one. Continue until you reach the expected number OR until you can think no more! You then select CONTINUE and move on. Sometimes, you will be asked to provide lists of words based on prefixes and suffixes, which helps change up the game a bit.

Because it is not timed, this game is challenging without being forceful or inciting pressure. However, the one thing I was not too happy about was when you selected CONTINUE, it did not show the remaining expected word list before moving on to the next root. You explicitly must select “Show All Words” to see the full answer list before going on to the next challenge. There are no points, or ways to see how well you did, so no real way of seeing improvement or creating competitiveness amongst friends. It would be nice to have something of that nature. It was kind of painful to have to select “Try” every time to submit a word, but I really don’t know what other option there is. It might be more user friendly to allow the user to enter multiple words in the collection window, press TRY and then have the app color incorrect words in red, so users know to remove or fix them.

As simple as the app is, it is still fun to play and actually gets the mind going. It is really a great way to think about words, where they come from and realize the link between them because of their origin. I can see this being a great benefit to students or anyone looking for just the right word. Personally, I found Tangled Roots engaging and interesting and hope my kids do as well.