The Tell

Twelve passages. Each one has a word in it that does not exist — Pimothy made it up. Here's the thing, though: you are not being asked what it means. Not first. You are asked which words told you. No timer, no lives, no buzzer noise. Stop whenever you want and you keep what you earned.

How it works

1 · Read the whole thing. Don't stop at the strange word.
2 · Click every word that tells you. Click again to un-click. There is no penalty for thinking.
3 · Submit. You see what you caught, what you walked past, and what wasn't evidence at all.
4 · Then say what the word means.

The ladders get harder in one specific way each time: the clue moves further from the word, then disappears into behaviour, then starts hiding next to fakes.

Why this one

On the first Monday of the year you all read a story about a heron called the Admiral. Nine of you underlined the right words in it. Two of you wrote them down when I asked. That is not a reading problem.

You already see the evidence — that part is handled. This game is only the bit where you point at it, which turns out to be the bit that counts.

There is also a word in that story — crullow — that the story defined in its own sentence, and most of the room walked past the definition. Ladder 1 is that, on purpose.

Run complete

A word you have never seen is almost never a dead end. Somebody in the sentence already told you — in a comma, in the sentence next door, or in what a person does. Your job was to point at which.

Hidden challenge — claim it

How many of the tells you picked were describers — words describing a noun or an action — rather than nouns or verbs?

Write it on your ledger card. Molly checks it Thursday. The game does not mark this one.