Daily Brains · three words on the slab, a scalpel, and a tray of toe tags.
Word Autopsy is the etymology puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Every day three words arrive on the morgue slab, the same three for every player. You dissect each one: cut it into its parts, tag each part with its meaning, then name the language it came from. Monday is gentle; by Sunday the specimens are long, technical and full of traps.
STORY & LORE
The specimens
The bank holds 560 dissections drawn from well-documented roots: Greek and Latin compounds (PHOTO·GRAPH, CARNI·VORE), Greek + Latin hybrids (TELE·VISION), Old English and Old Norse compounds (NOS·TRIL, WIND·OW), and loans from French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic and Persian (DAN·DE·LION, UMBR·ELLA, TSU·NAMI, AL·GEBRA). Each comes with a one-line autopsy note from the coroner.
The schedule
Words are sorted into easy, medium, hard and extreme pools, and each pool is dealt in a single fixed rotation. A word cannot come back for at least 150 days, and the exact set of three never repeats within a year. The day's word list, decoy tags and options all come from the puzzle number, so there is no randomness between players.
HOW IT PLAYS
1 · The incision
Tap between letters (or use the arrow keys and Space) to cut the word into its parts, then press Make the incision. Each cut that matches a true boundary scores; a cut one letter off is forgiven when the skipped letter is a linking vowel (PHOT|OPHOBIA for PHOTO|PHOBIA). Stray cuts cancel correct ones. The true split is then shown, so a botched cut never blocks the next steps.
2 · Identification
Drag a toe tag onto each part, or tap a tag and then a slot (keys 1 to 9 work too). The tray always has decoy meanings, often from roots that look alike, such as light for PHOB. A decoy is never the true meaning or a close synonym of it.
3 · Cause of death
Pick the language the parts come from. The options never pit Latin against French or Old English against German, because those would be unfair. From Wednesday on, some bodies also ask which of four words shares a body part (same root, same meaning) with the specimen. Grammatical endings such as -IA or -IC don't count, and the three wrong options share nothing with it at all.
Scoring and streaks
Each body is worth 100: incision 30, tags 40, cause of death 30 (15 for the language and 15 for the shared part when that question is asked). The day is out of 300. Closing a case with 50% accuracy or better counts as a win for the streak, and 300/300 is a perfect autopsy. The share card shows a 🟩🟨🟥 row for each body.
THE WEEK
| Day | Bodies | Decoy tags | Origin options | Extras |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday · Gentle | easy ×3 | 2 | 4 | part count shown |
| Tuesday · Mild | easy, easy, medium | 2 | 4 | part count shown |
| Wednesday · Tricky | easy, medium, medium | 3 | 4 | shared-part question on body III |
| Thursday · Testing | medium ×3 | 3 | 4 | shared-part question on bodies II–III |
| Friday · Tough | medium, medium, hard | 4 | 5 | shared-part question on every body |
| Saturday · Brutal | medium, hard, extreme | 4 | 5 | part count withheld |
| Sunday · Fiendish | hard, extreme, extreme | 5 | 5 | part count withheld |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Close the case (50%+) | 15 Tickets |
| Perfect autopsy (300/300) | +25 Tickets |
| First Incision | 🔪 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Chief Medical Examiner (perfect day) | 🔬 Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Night Shift (3-day streak) | 🏷️ Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Resident Pathologist (7-day streak) | 🩺 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Keeper of the Morgue (30-day streak) | ⚰️ Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version: 560 dissections, three bodies a day, ramping from Monday · Gentle to Sunday · Fiendish.
- Incision, toe-tag identification and cause-of-death steps, with linking-vowel forgiveness and decoy tags.
- Shared-part question on harder days, coroner's-report results and a spoiler-free share card.
- Streaks, case-file stats and cloud-mirrored progress.