What makes a scramble hard
Length is the obvious factor and it is not the main one. Nine letters is 362,880 orderings, which sounds impossible, but nobody searches orderings. People search for fragments they recognise, and the number of recognisable fragments in a word is what decides how quickly it falls. A word with a TION, an ING or a double letter hands you a four-letter anchor immediately. A word whose letters are all common and all different gives you nothing to grab and has to be attacked vowel-first.
The categories here differ in exactly that way. Occupations are the easiest set because so many of them end in ER, IST, OR or IAN, and spotting the suffix collapses the problem to the stem. Countries are the hardest despite being familiar words, because the letter patterns are borrowed from other languages and English suffix instincts do not apply. Produce sits in the middle. If a round feels unusually easy or unusually stuck, check which categories came up before concluding anything about yourself.
How the scoring works
Solving a word unaided is ten points, solving it after taking the first-letter hint is five, and a skip is zero, so a ten-word round tops out at 100. Wrong guesses are counted but cost nothing, which is deliberate: guessing aloud is how anagrams actually get solved, and penalising it would only make people sit and stare. The one real cost of a wrong guess is the clock, and the summary reports seconds per word so you can see it.
The hint gives the first letter and nothing else. That is worth more than it looks in this bank, because English words are very unevenly distributed across first letters, and knowing the word starts with a Z or a Q inside a fifty-word category often narrows it to two or three candidates.
The word bank
| Category | Words | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Fruit and vegetables | 42 | Supermarket produce, nothing exotic |
| Animals | 48 | Mammals, birds, reptiles and a few invertebrates |
| Countries | 69 | Single-word country names only |
| Occupations | 50 | Trades and professions, no job titles |
| Household objects | 49 | Things in an ordinary house |
Every entry is a single word with no spaces, hyphens or accents, which is why New Zealand, the United States and South Africa are not in the country list. That restriction exists because scrambling across a space either gives the answer away or produces something unreadable, and neither is a good puzzle.
Where the shuffle comes from
Each word's letters are shuffled with Fisher-Yates, drawing indices from crypto.getRandomValues where the browser has it and from Math.random where it does not; the note under the board says which one ran. Every ordering of the letters has the same probability, and if the shuffle happens to reproduce the original word it is thrown away and redrawn. The ten words themselves are also a Fisher-Yates selection from the filtered pool, so the same word will not appear twice in one round.
Words with repeated letters are worth a moment's thought here. RASPBERRY has two Rs, so several distinct shuffles look identical, and its scrambled form has fewer visually different outcomes than its length suggests. That does not affect fairness, only the impression that the same scramble keeps coming back.
Questions people ask
It says my answer is wrong but I am sure it is right.
Almost always a spelling variant rather than a wrong word. The bank uses American spellings and single-word forms, so the check will not accept an alternative even when it means the same thing. Capitalisation and spaces are ignored, so those are never the problem. If you are stuck on a country, remember the list contains only single-word names.
Is the score saved between rounds?
No. The state lives in the page while it is open and disappears on reload. There is no history, no account and no leaderboard. The share button copies the summary text if you want a record of it.
Why does the same word keep coming up?
With a narrow filter the pool gets small. Eight letters or more inside a single category can leave under twenty candidates, and drawing ten of twenty means most of them appear most rounds. Widen the category or drop the length filter and the repetition stops.
Can I add my own word list?
Not on this page. The bank is fixed so that the categories and the difficulty stay predictable. If you want a scramble over vocabulary from a specific lesson, the practical route is to write the words out and shuffle each one by hand, or use the bingo generator on this site with your own list for a different kind of drill.