How False Root works
Every day, one word and four origin stories. One is true. Three are lies. Strike the lies, most confident first, and never strike the true one: touching the truth ends the round.
Each lie you strike is worth a point. Strike all three for a clean sweep. Then the reveal: the word’s journey across languages, the real story, and how each lie was built. On a keyboard, 1–4 strike a story and S shares your result.
One try a day
Every word gives you one try per day. A word you have just seen the answer to would only test your memory, so there is no instant rematch. It opens again the next day with the four stories in a different order. Your best result is the one that’s kept, so trying again can never cost you.
The traps
Every lie exploits a real pattern of etymological nonsense: a just-so story (a vivid tale invented to explain a word), a fake eponym (an invented founder with a tidy date), a false classical root (real Latin or Greek, wrong word), or a wrong borrowing route (a genuine donor language on the wrong path). The sharpest are true folk etymologies, where the word itself gets re-cut into familiar English pieces, the way asparagus really did become sparrowgrass. Every reveal names the pattern a lie was built on, and gives the word’s first recorded date in English, plus the date the modern sense settled where those differ.
How each word is checked
Every true origin is verified against Wiktionary and Etymonline before it ships, and every invented one is checked for the opposite problem: that it might accidentally be true. Anything scholars dispute is labelled disputed, and the hedge goes inside the option you have to judge, not just in the notes afterwards. A linter flags every word where the true story is the odd one out on length, dating, naming or punctuation, because a game you can win by reading the author is not a game about etymology.
I build False Root on my own. Etymology is a field of live argument, and I am summarising scholarship rather than settling it, so treat a reveal as a good place to start rather than something to cite. Every reveal links its sources and carries a Report a problem link for when a puzzle is wrong. You can also write to corrections@falseroot.com. Corrections get made and said out loud.
Your words, and your streak
Every word you finish is filed by its origin family, so you are collecting languages as well as days. A word you swept is mastered. One that got past you waits under To revisit. Playing daily builds a streak, and every seven days banks a freeze, up to two. One freeze quietly covers a missed day. Freezes are earned, never sold. Your streak, your best and the freezes you hold are shown before you play, so the chain is never a surprise.
The week is the unit above the day: seven squares, Monday to Sunday, one per word, and a tally that resets every Monday, so it can be beaten. Only daily rounds count towards it. On Sunday, the day that closes the week, your share carries the whole row.
The Words page keeps the record: days played, best streak, words met, lies struck, and how each kind of lie has got past you, which is the one figure here that teaches.
Comparing notes
A result you share carries your own round for that word inside the link, scrambled so it does not read as an answer in the address bar. A friend who opens it meets the same four stories, and once their round is over they see the two rounds side by side, strike for strike. Nothing about it is stored or sent anywhere, and sharing back sends theirs.
Accounts and data
Signing in is optional: everything works without it and is saved in this browser. Sign in and your progress follows you to any device, merged rather than overwritten. No tracking, no ads, nothing sold. The privacy page has the specifics.
The first time you finish a word, the site records one line: which stories you struck, in what order, and whether the true one got you. First attempts only, one per person, so the game can tell you how everybody else read a word. Once ten people have met a word, its reveal says how many struck the truth, as a count; a percentage appears only once a word has been played enough to mean anything, about a hundred and fifty first attempts. No invented numbers, ever.