grande verse / play / the missing word

a title with one word taken out of it, and three seconds of the record to work out which word. one underscore per letter, one free letter per round if you want it, and three lives.

the blank is always a word worth knowing — never “the”, and never a word printed somewhere else in the same title, which would put the answer next to its own gap.

49 songs qualify: they need a preview to hear and a title with a word that can be fairly hidden, which rules out the one-word titles and a handful whose every candidate repeats. no lyrics appear anywhere in this game, and that is why it takes this shape rather than muting a word out of the vocal — doing that means holding a lyric transcript and word-level timings for it, which this site will not do. a title is an identifier, a fact about a record on the same footing as its tracklist. the clips are played from apple’s own preview urls and never downloaded or cut on our side; the sleeves appear only after the answer, beside a link to the song. your best score is stored in your browser.