What counts as a word.
Perkul runs on a curated modern-English lexicon that we maintain ourselves. Being recorded somewhere in the history of English is not sufficient. A word earns its place if an educated English speaker could reasonably encounter it - even if they personally do not know it.
Included
- Standard modern English words, common and uncommon.
- Difficult but genuinely encounterable vocabulary: DEARTH, SINEW, FROND, CAVIL. Occasionally something like BRUME as a hard decoy.
- Words with a real presence in contemporary writing.
Excluded
- Proper nouns, place names, surnames and brand names.
- Abbreviations and acronyms.
- Obsolete and highly archaic vocabulary.
- Narrow regional dialect forms and obscure historical spellings.
- Technical jargon with no general readership.
- Foreign words that have not genuinely entered English.
- Intentional misspellings and internet slang.
A fourteenth-century Scottish spelling that survives in one specialist dictionary is not a fair puzzle answer, and it will not appear here.
The fabricated word
Every fake is written to obey English spelling and sound patterns, and every fake is checked against the accepted lexicon before a game can be published. If a fabrication turns out to be a real accepted word, that is a bug in our content and we want to know.
Fairness
Rounds are built so that roughly three of the five words are reasonable anchors for a strong vocabulary player, one is a legitimate word chosen because it looks like the fake, and one is the fabrication. Five obscure words is a failure state, not a difficulty setting.
Disputes
If you believe a word was wrong - a fake that is real, a real word that should not qualify, or a definition that misleads - tell us. Include the game number and the round. Reports go to words@perkul.com and are reviewed editorially. Corrections are made to the lexicon so the same dispute cannot recur.
Not machine-generated at play time
Games are written, validated and reviewed before publication. Nothing you play was generated by a language model at the moment you pressed start. The fake words are hand-crafted, not AI-generated.