Oh, My Word!

An exercise in thinking different.

One of the online word games that’s held my attention lately is called Oh, My Word! It’s a simple crossword game with a twist. What it’s looking for is not knowledge, but nonconformity.

You’re given a grid like the one above, with some letters already filled in. You can complete it with any “real words” that’ll work, but you’re being scored on originality. The fewer other people use each word that you put in, the more points you earn. Kind of the opposite of Family Feud, where the object is to guess what most other people guessed.

For instance, I filled today’s entry out like so…

And found that two of my words were total originals (QUOIT and NEHRU), one was at least less common than the average (BING), and one was a pretty common go-to answer (BURR).

There are a few wrinkles to this seemingly simple exercise. One is that everyone else is trying to be unconventional, too. So even though the word BEER is more common than BURR in everyday speech, BURR ended up being more common within this game (as I confirmed when I played a second round on another device).

Also, since the scores are based on how everyone else plays the game, your score changes as other people play! I’m showing you my score as I write this, but I could lose my 100’s as soon as anyone else submits QUOIT or NEHRU. It’s easy to get a high score by playing each new game right when it releases (about 10 AM EST), but you won’t find out if you held that high score until the next game’s release.

Like the best of the Wordlesque app-games, it’s a few minutes’ diversion at most. But for anything that teaches nonconformist thinking, those few minutes might be worth sparing.