Real or Fake? A 40-Word Quiz on the Strangest Playable Spellings

Valid A written shiver, the noise people make when they step into the cold. The longer brrr is in the list as well, so both lengths score.

Not valid The written call for quiet, and a near-miss: shh with two Hs is accepted, but the list stores the sound only in that form, so the extra H pushes it outside. The older word for the same request, hush, is probably imitative too, perhaps chosen because the sound can be made very faintly.

Valid A Welsh word for a valley, used in geography for a steep, bowl-shaped hollow at the head of a glacial valley. In the Welsh spelling the W carries the vowel sound, roughly “koom”.

Valid Borrowed from the mathematical use of n for an unspecified number, as in “for the nth time”. It is one of only 13 words in the game’s list with no A, E, I, O, U, Y or W at all.

Not valid A much-loved Welsh-English word for a cuddle or a snug little hiding place. Wiktionary traces it through Welsh cwtsh to the same Middle English source as couch. It looks like a cousin of cwm and crwth, which is exactly why it feels safe, but the list does not include it.

Valid The whispered call used to get someone’s attention without the whole room hearing, usually described as imitative of the sounds people make to call animals. Its plural-looking relative pssts is not in the list, so stop at four letters.

Valid The small plastic or metal tip on the end of a shoelace. The word came into English from French and is related to a diminutive of the word for a needle, which suits the object well.

Valid An old stringed instrument associated especially with Wales, a kind of lyre that was usually bowed, though it could also be plucked. Like cwm, it uses W as a vowel, and the plural crwths is accepted too.

Valid An exclamation of mild irritation or dismissal, written the way it sounds. Five letters, no vowels, and it still counts, which makes it a good word to remember when a P round stalls.

Not valid The most ordinary-looking word in this round is the one that fails. It comes from Japanese e (picture) and moji (character); the Online Etymology Dictionary credits the Japanese coinage to Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 and dates English use to 2008. Despite being everywhere in modern English it is missing from the game’s fixed list.

Valid A humorous American word for an umbrella. The usual explanation is a playful alteration of umbrella combined with the -chute of parachute, spelled “shoot”.

Valid An arrangement of five things with four at the corners of a square and one in the middle, like the five spots on a die. In Latin it named a coin worth five-twelfths of a larger unit, and quincunxes and quincunxial are both accepted.

Not valid The pleasant earthy smell that comes with rain after a dry spell. It sounds ancient because it is built from Greek parts (petra, stone, and ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods), but it was coined by two Australian scientists in the 1960s and is not in the list.

Valid The alignment of three celestial bodies in a straight line, such as the Sun, Earth and Moon during an eclipse. It comes from a Greek word for being yoked together, and its three Ys stand in for every vowel.

Valid The rumbling, gurgling noise of gas moving through the intestines. The Greek original was meant to imitate that sound, and the plural borborygmi also scores.

Valid The ringing and jingling of bells, built on the Latin tintinnabulum, a small bell. Edgar Allan Poe made it memorable in his poem “The Bells”, and at 16 letters it is the longest valid word in this quiz.

Valid The warning shout once given in Edinburgh before slops were thrown from an upstairs window into the street. It is usually traced to a mangled form of a French warning along the lines of garde à l’eau, “beware of the water”.

Valid Moving anticlockwise, or against the direction of the sun, a word long associated with Scots and with bad luck. It is recorded from the 1510s and probably comes from Middle Low German weddersinnes, “against the way”. Plain anticlockwise is also accepted, if you would rather not gamble on the spelling.

Valid Contemplation of one’s own navel, whether as a meditation practice or as a mocking description of self-absorption. It joins Greek omphalos (navel) and skepsis (examination).

Not valid Someone who offers opinions far beyond their own expertise. It echoes the Latin saying about a shoemaker who should not judge above the sandal, and it looks every bit as dictionary-worthy as omphaloskepsis, but this list leaves it out.

Valid To throw someone or something out of a window, from Latin fenestra, window. The noun defenestration is best known from the Defenestration of Prague in 1618, and both forms are accepted.

Valid To leave suddenly, often without paying or saying goodbye. It is probably a piece of mock-Latin from American slang of the 1830s, and the list also has absquatulated and absquatulates.

Not valid The singular looks like a reasonable back-formation, but the list only holds the plural-shaped collywobbles. The word is almost always used in that plural form for a nervous, queasy stomach, which is probably why the list has no separate singular entry.

Valid Stomach ache, or the fluttery nerves that feel like one. It is often explained as a playful blend of colic and wobble, and it scores exactly as spelled here.

Valid A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician who will say anything to win. It is a 19th-century Americanism, and snollygosters is accepted as well.

Valid To dawdle or waste time instead of getting on with something. It is American English from the 1850s, and the variant lallygag is actually recorded a few years earlier. The list has the full set of forms for both spellings, from lollygags to lallygagging, eight entries in all.

Valid A fuss or commotion, usually over something that did not deserve one. It grew out of the Scots curfuffle, and it remains common in informal British English.

Not valid A stubborn attachment to a mistake, or a person who keeps making it after being corrected. The old story behind it involves an elderly cleric who misread the Latin sumpsimus for years and refused to change, and the word looks exactly like the other Latin-flavoured curiosities here, but the list does not include it.

Valid To baffle someone completely. It turns up by the 1830s in English and Australian slang; its origin is uncertain, though the Oxford English Dictionary has suggested a British dialect source. At seven letters it is a realistic answer to find in an F round.

Valid To run away in a hurry. It spread as American slang in the 1860s, and skedaddled, skedaddles and skedaddling are all accepted.

Valid A flighty, gossipy or frivolous person. Shakespeare used Flibbertigibbet as the name of a fiend in King Lear, and the 15-letter word is in the list today.

Not valid The act of judging something worthless, built from four Latin words that all mean roughly “of little value”. It is quoted constantly in lists of long words, but at 29 letters it is longer than any entry in the game’s list, whose longest words have 28 letters.

Valid Given to using long words, or simply long. It comes from the Roman poet Horace’s joke about sesquipedalia verba, “words a foot and a half long”, and the word neatly describes itself.

Valid The comic misuse of a word in place of a similar-sounding one. It is named after Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775), and malaprop and malapropisms are also accepted.

Not valid This is the British spelling of a real word for excessive, rambling talk. The list is American-based and only stores logorrhea, so the extra O costs you the point; the same pattern trips people up with some other British spellings.

Valid Talk that pours out without stopping, from Greek logos (word) and the -rrhea ending meaning a flow. The related forms logorrheas and logorrheic score as well.

Valid A figure of speech in which one word governs two others in different senses, as in “she lost her keys and her temper” (some grammarians call this particular type syllepsis). The name comes from a Greek word for a yoke, and zeugmas is accepted.

Valid Pompous, jargon-filled language that is hard to understand. It was coined in 1944 by Maury Maverick, a former Texas congressman then running a wartime federal agency, in a memo banning jargon-laden official language, and the variant gobbledegook scores too.

Not valid Probably the most familiar word in the whole quiz, and still a miss. A photograph taken of oneself, formed from self plus the familiar -ie ending; the Online Etymology Dictionary records it by 2005 and notes claims of use from 2002. The game’s fixed list does not include it or selfies.

Valid A noisy uproar or public fuss. It is recorded from 1762, chiefly in northern England and Scotland, and may be a rhyming doubling of hollo, a shout for attention. Unlike some of its neighbours in this quiz it is still in everyday use.