Guess the Word
The pleasant smell of rain falling on dry earth. The act of throwing someone or something out of a window. A definition appears and the word is missing from it, and the whole guess list — all 87 words — is sitting in the search box waiting to be scrolled.
Mostly this is vocabulary worth owning, with a handful of rarities that are only here because somebody had to name the smell of rain on dry ground.
Name the word from its definition.
Play Guess the WordPlay the odds on the part of speech
The deck is 56 adjectives, 23 nouns and eight verbs. That imbalance is worth carrying into every round: if the definition describes a quality — a way of being noisy, or reticent, or short-lived — you are in the two thirds of the file that are adjectives, and the search box is much easier to scan when you know which kind of word you are hunting.
The definitions are written from scratch rather than copied, in plain language and short enough to fit on a stage. They also never contain the word itself or an obvious derivative of it, which is checked mechanically rather than by eye — so an unusual word in the definition is genuinely a different word rather than a leak.
The clue ladder
Three clues at a rung each, and they are deliberately mechanical. First the part of speech and the letter count — noun, 9 letters. That count is measured off the word itself rather than typed into the seed file, because a hand-counted nine that is wrong makes the round unwinnable.
Then the first letter, which with a searchable list is close to decisive. Then the etymology or a usage note, which is usually the thing that finally shakes the word loose: that the Latin for window sits inside defenestration, or that umbrage is Latin for shade, and being put in someone's shadow is what it feels like to be slighted.
What is not in here
Nothing was included unless both the spelling and the sense were certain. The words that only exist on internet lists of untranslatable words — sonder, and most of that family — are not in a dictionary and are not here either.
That leaves a list that is genuinely useful: petrichor and susurrus at one end, and pragmatic, resilient, meticulous and frugal at the other. A run through this deck is a reasonable vocabulary test rather than a trivia round about invented words.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240, entirely offline. The interesting tension is that the answer is always visible — it is somewhere in a list of 87 — so a round is never truly lost, only expensive. Reading the list costs nothing; submitting the wrong entry costs a rung.