Being a full account of every rhetorical, metrical and phonetic contrivance recognised by Wordsmith's Gauntlet, with worked examples, and — where the machinery is cruder than the art — an honest confession of the fact.
60 entries. They cover all 40 Inkblots, all 13 Forms (3 of them boss forms), and the six base scoring properties every composition is measured against.
A word on method. The game owns no dictionary of pronunciations and no parser. It owns a hand-tagged word list of a few hundred entries and a set of deliberately crude orthographic rules — what the codebase calls Tier-1 approximations. Where a device is scored by spelling rather than by sound or sense, this glossary says so plainly. You are going to reverse-engineer the scorer anyway; we may as well hand you the blueprints and preserve the pretence of dignity.
Every worked example marked In play is built only from words that exist in the game's dictionary, and triggers the effect described. You may play them as written.
Every submission is reduced to a number in a fixed order, and the order matters.
1. Base properties. Six things are counted before anything clever happens. Each has a tunable multiplier in the drawer; the defaults are given here.
multBase (default 3).concrete, at multConcrete (4).vivid, at multVivid (3).multAllit (6). Three matching words make three pairs, four make six; the reward grows quadratically and the Gauntlet is not sorry.multRhyme (10).multForm (×1.5). This happens before Inkblots.2. The Form. Match it and the total is multiplied. Miss it and you get nothing extra — unless you own Mrs. Malaprop, who salvages 75% of the bonus.
3. Inkblots. Every owned Inkblot's effect is applied in turn, to the already-multiplied total. Percentage Inkblots (Hemingway, The Orator, Iambic Foot) therefore compound with everything that came before them, which is why they cost what they cost. The final figure is rounded and floored at zero.
Two terms recur throughout and are worth learning:
NN, VB, JJ, RB). These carry meaning.is/was/are, and the negations and interrogatives. Most sound devices ignore filler entirely.Six entries. The oldest pleasures in the language, and the ones the game measures most crudely: it reads letters, not phonemes. An initial sh, ch, th, wh or ph is read as one sound, any initial vowel is read as a single generic vowel sound, and everything else is simply its first letter.
The repetition of the same initial sound across nearby words. It is the native metre of Old English verse and the reason advertising copy sounds the way it does: the ear registers the pattern before the mind registers the claim, so alliteration lends an assertion an entirely unearned air of inevitability.
In play: silent serpent slithers softly — four content words on s, which is six alliterating pairs, not four.
In the wild: "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / The furrow followed free" — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The game scores it: base property. Content words are grouped by initial sound; every group of two or more contributes n(n−1)/2 pairs at multAllit (default 6). Filler words are excluded from the grouping. The ALLITERATION and TONGUE TWISTER Forms both reward it structurally.
Pronounced ASS-uh-nunce. The repetition of a vowel sound in words whose consonants differ — fleet feet, lake fade. Where alliteration is percussive and attracts attention, assonance is a held note under the line; it slows a phrase down and makes it feel sung rather than said.
In play: the captain sails in rain — three content words whose final vowel-cluster begins in a.
In the wild: "Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea" — Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The long o is doing the mourning.
The game scores it: The Vowel-Singer Inkblot. Each content word is reduced to its rhyme key — the stretch of the word from its last vowel onward — and grouped by the first letter of that key. Any group of three or more pays out that many words × multAssonance (default 3). Tier-1 caveat: this is spelling, not sound. sea and tea group together; blue and you would not.
Pronounced KON-suh-nunce. Repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words, with the vowels left free to vary — blank, think, drunk. It is alliteration's discreet cousin: it binds a line together without ever announcing that it is doing so.
In play: the cannon and the iron thorn — three content words closing on n.
In the wild: "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees" — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Come Down, O Maid. The whole apparatus of the line is a sustained m.
The game scores it: The Knell Inkblot. Content words are grouped by their final letter, vowels excluded; a group of three or more pays out that many words × multConsonance (default 3). Tier-1 caveat: only the last letter is examined, so think and blank — genuine consonance — group under k together with book, and silent letters are counted as though spoken.
Pronounced SIB-il-unce. The particular hiss produced by clustering s, sh, z and soft c sounds. It is the one consonant effect with an inbuilt connotation: whispering, serpents, conspiracy, and a certain class of villain. Poets reach for it when they want a line to sound like it is telling you something it shouldn't.
In play: silver serpent shrieks softly — four sibilant openings.
In the wild: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" — Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven. The curtain is audibly moving.
The game scores it: The Serpent's Tongue Inkblot. Every word — filler included, unusually — whose initial sound is s or sh pays multSibilance (default 3). Tier-1 caveat: it is strictly word-initial. The hiss in whispers, rises and plunders earns nothing at all.
Pronounced on-uh-mat-uh-PEE-uh. A word that imitates the sound it names: boom, hiss, clang, thud. The purest case of a word meaning something by being something, and consequently the device most beloved of small children and war poets alike.
In play: the cannon roars and the shell thuds — two onomatopoeic words.
In the wild: "the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells" — Poe, The Bells. He coined the long word and then rang it.
The game scores it: The Onomatopoeia Engine Inkblot. Words carrying the onoma tag pay multOnoma (default 5) each. The tag is hand-applied in the dictionary, not detected: boom, crash, clang, knell, hisses, roars, thuds and howls are the whole roster. Nothing is inferred from spelling.
Correspondence of sound from the last stressed vowel of a word to its end. It is the most conspicuous device in English verse and the most double-edged: used well it locks two ideas together as though logic had insisted on it, and used badly it announces that the second line exists only to end in -ation.
In play: as a couplet — the raven haunts the night / the candle burns bright.
In the wild: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." — Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism.
The game scores it: base property, at multRhyme (default 10) for every qualifying pair at least two positions apart. Two words rhyme if their rhyme keys match outright, or if the keys share a first letter and an identical final two letters. A word never rhymes with itself. The RHYMING COUPLET and TERCET Forms are built on it, and The Bard Inkblot adds a further 50%.
Tier-1 caveat, and the largest one in the game: rhyme is judged from spelling. This is why the matcher demands a shared first vowel letter — an earlier, looser version cheerfully rhymed salty with shifty. The cost of that strictness is slant rhymes are missed: plunders and wonders do rhyme, and the game will not notice. Emily Dickinson, who built a body of work on the slant rhyme, would score poorly here. The real fix is a phoneme dictionary, and it is deferred.
Nine entries. Metre is the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables into repeating feet. The game does not detect stress at all — it has no way to know that CAP-tain falls one way and de-CO-rum another. What it has is a syllable count per dictionary word, and every metrical Inkblot is built on syllable shape as a proxy for stress. This is the game's most cheerful approximation and you should treat these entries as a poet's mnemonic, not as scansion.
A unit of pronunciation containing one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants. Storm is one, captain two, cathedral three. Syllables are the currency of metre, and in this game the currency of the haiku.
In play: silver moon rises — two, one, two: five syllables, a legal haiku opening line.
In the wild: the entire tradition of counted verse, from the seventeen syllables of the Japanese haiku to the ten of the English pentameter.
The game scores it: not directly, but everything metrical reads from it. Each dictionary word carries a hand-checked syllable count; anything outside the dictionary falls back to counting vowel groups, which is right more often than it deserves to be. The HAIKU Form checks 5/7/5 with ±1 tolerance per line, and the compose rows will display syllable targets if the drawer's syllable readout is on.
Pronounced EYE-am; the adjective is iambic, eye-AM-bik. A metrical foot of two syllables, unstressed then stressed — da-DUM. It is the default heartbeat of English verse because it is very nearly the default rhythm of English speech; five of them in a row make the iambic pentameter, and once you hear it you will not stop hearing it.
In play: the pirate drinks the rum — six syllables, an even count, which is what the Inkblot actually wants.
In the wild: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" — William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18. Five iambs, unimprovable.
The game scores it: The Iambic Foot Inkblot. If the composition's total syllable count is even, the whole total is multiplied by 1.2. Tier-1 caveat, stated without embarrassment: this is not scansion. An even syllable count merely means the line could be divided into two-syllable feet. The Inkblot rewards the possibility and asks no further questions.
Pronounced TROH-kee; the adjective is trochaic, troh-KAY-ik. The iamb reversed: stressed then unstressed, DUM-da. Trochaic verse falls rather than rises, which gives it a chanting, incantatory quality — the metre of spells, drums and nursery rhymes.
In play: raven burns shadow — a two-, one-, two-syllable run.
In the wild: "By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water" — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, the most relentlessly trochaic long poem in English.
The game scores it: The Falling Foot Inkblot. It looks for a run of three or more consecutive words alternating two syllables, one syllable, two, one… beginning on a two-syllable word. Every word in a qualifying run pays multTrochee (default 3). Tier-1 caveat: a two-syllable word is assumed to be trochaic. Most English two-syllable nouns are; decorum and forgotten are not, and the game will not be told.
Pronounced DAK-til. A three-syllable foot, stressed then two unstressed — DUM-da-da. It tumbles. Dactylic verse gallops, which is why it turns up in cavalry poems and in comic verse that wishes to appear out of control.
In play: tedious decorum — two adjacent three-syllable words.
In the wild: "Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward" — Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. You can hear the horses.
The game scores it: The Tumbling Dactyl Inkblot. Every adjacent pair of three-syllable words pays multDactyl (default 6). Tier-1 caveat: three syllables is taken as sufficient evidence of a dactyl. Monocle obliges; cathedral does not, being an amphibrach, and is paid anyway.
Pronounced SPON-dee. A foot of two consecutive stressed syllables — DUM-DUM. English resists it; a true spondee is rare and lands like a dropped anvil, which is precisely its use. Poets deploy one to arrest a line that has been running too smoothly.
In play: sharp bone — two single-syllable content words shoulder to shoulder. black skull bleeds gives two overlapping pairs.
In the wild: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" — Shakespeare, Sonnet 18. Rough winds is the textbook English spondee, and it exists to break the iambic pattern the sonnet has just established.
The game scores it: The Spondee Inkblot. Every adjacent pair of single-syllable content words pays multSpondee (default 4). Filler is excluded, which is correct — of the is nobody's spondee. Tier-1 caveat: a monosyllabic content word is treated as stressed, which is usually true and occasionally libellous.
Pronounced eye-SOK-ruh-nee. Equal timing — a line in which every unit takes the same span. Its blunt English cousin is the run of monosyllables, a line built entirely of one-beat words, which reads as either hammering intensity or dogged plainness depending on who is holding the hammer.
In play: the sly fox finds hope — four content words, one syllable apiece.
In the wild: "And ten low words oft creep in one dull line" — Pope, An Essay on Criticism, demonstrating the fault he is complaining about, which is the most Pope thing Pope ever did.
The game scores it: The Metronome Inkblot. If there are at least two content words and every one of them has the same syllable count, each pays multMetronome (default 3). Note that it need not be one syllable — a line of nothing but two-syllable words qualifies just as well, and pays just as much.
From the Greek for "many syllables"; the vice of overusing them is called sesquipedalianism, ses-kwi-puh-DAY-lee-un-ism, literally "a foot and a half long". Long words. Latinate, ceremonious, and heavy on the page. Deployed with judgement they confer gravity; deployed without it they confer the impression of a man being paid by the letter.
In play: the tedious baron ponders decorum — two words of three syllables.
In the wild: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine" — Shakespeare, Macbeth. Two enormous Latin words, immediately followed by the same idea in blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. That contrast is the whole point.
The game scores it: The Grandiloquent Inkblot. Every word of three or more syllables pays multPolysyl (default 4). No cap, no shame.
Pronounced siz-YOOR-uh (or sez-YOOR-uh). A deliberate pause inside a line, rather than at its end. In Old English verse every line has one by rule; in later English verse it is a matter of judgement, used to stop a line running away and to set its two halves against each other.
In play: raven burns and shadow falls — five words, and the pivot is a conjunction.
In the wild: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man." — Pope, An Essay on Man. The pause after thyself is the hinge the couplet turns on.
The game scores it: The Caesura Inkblot, and its trigger is strict. A line pays out only if it has five or more words, an odd number of them, and the word at its exact centre is filler or a conjunction. Each qualifying line pays multCaesura (default 8). A six-word line cannot have an exact centre and so can never qualify, however plainly it pauses in the middle.
Pronounced en-JAM-ment. A line of verse that runs on into the next without grammatical pause, so the sense spills over the line break. It creates a small productive tension between what the eye sees and what the sentence is doing, and it is the chief reason blank verse does not sound like a list.
In play: end a line on and, with, the or of and begin the next line mid-thought.
In the wild: "Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree…" — John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I. Twenty-six words before the main verb arrives, and the line breaks are load-bearing.
The game scores it: The Spillover Inkblot. Every line that is not the last and ends on a filler word, a preposition, or a conjunction pays multEnjambment (default 7). Tier-1 caveat: the game reads the dangling word's part of speech, not the grammar. A line ending on a noun may enjamb beautifully and earn nothing.
Seven entries. Every one of these is a named pattern of saying the same thing twice. What distinguishes them is where the repeated word falls, and the Greeks — who were nothing if not thorough — gave a separate name to every position.
Pronounced uh-NAF-uh-ruh. Repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive clauses or lines. It is the engine of oratory: each repetition resets the ear's expectation, and the accumulated pressure does the persuading that the argument may not be doing.
In play: three lines, each opening the. Cheap, effective, entirely legal.
In the wild: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." — Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
The game scores it: The Anaphora Inkblot. Non-empty lines are grouped by their first word; every repetition beyond the first in a group pays +6. Two lines opening alike is one echo; three is two. It needs a multi-line Form — couplet, tercet, haiku, list of three.
Pronounced eh-PIS-truh-fee. Anaphora's mirror: repetition of the same word at the end of successive clauses. Because the ear remembers endings, epistrophe lands harder than anaphora and is correspondingly harder to use without sounding like a man closing a sale.
In play: end two lines on the same word — sea and sea.
In the wild: "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" — Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address.
The game scores it: The Refrain Inkblot. Non-empty lines are grouped by their last word; every repetition beyond the first pays multEpistrophe (default 6).
Pronounced an-uh-di-PLOH-sis. Repetition of the last word of one clause as the first word of the next, so the sentence hauls itself forward hand over hand. Chain the device across several clauses and you have a gradatio — an argument that appears to prove itself by momentum alone.
In play: end line one on storm and open line two on storm.
In the wild: "tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope" — Romans 5:3–4, King James Version.
The game scores it: The Echo-Chain Inkblot. Every junction where a line's last word equals the next line's first word pays multAnadiplosis (default 10) — one of the richest per-instance payouts in the game, and it needs a multi-line Form to exist at all.
Pronounced ep-uh-nuh-LEP-sis. A unit that begins and ends on the same word, so the phrase closes the circle it opened. It has a formal, liturgical weight — having travelled, you arrive exactly where you started, and the return is the argument.
In play: sea captain sea — and note this also satisfies the PALINDROME boss form, which is a pleasant piece of double-dipping.
In the wild: "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice." — Philippians 4:4, King James Version.
The game scores it: The Bookend Inkblot. If the composition is three or more words and the first word equals the last, it pays multBookend (default 12) — once, flatly, regardless of length. The check runs across the whole composition, not line by line.
Pronounced dye-AK-uh-pee. A word repeated after a brief interruption — a word or two of something else, then the word again. The interruption is the device: it makes the repetition sound like a second thought rather than a stammer.
In play: the sea and sea — sea, one word of glue, sea.
In the wild: "To be, or not to be" — Shakespeare, Hamlet. The two-word interruption is precisely what makes the line a hinge rather than a statement.
The game scores it: The Second Thought Inkblot. Every pair of identical words separated by a gap of two or three positions pays multDiacope (default 8). A word repeated immediately (a gap of one) is not diacope and earns nothing here — though The Pun Gun would pay for it.
Pronounced pol-ip-TOH-ton. Repetition of words sharing a root but differing in form — sail and sailor, judge and judgement. It lets a writer hammer one idea repeatedly while appearing to vary the vocabulary, which is either subtle rhetoric or a con, depending on the writer.
In play: the sailor sails — one root, two grammatical costumes. silence, silent and silently together yield three pairs.
In the wild: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" — Genesis 9:6, King James Version, where sheddeth/shed is the polyptoton (and the whole verse is also a chiasmus). "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity" — Ecclesiastes 1:2 — is the other line always cited, though grammarians argue about which figure it properly belongs to.
The game scores it: The Family Resemblance Inkblot. Every pair of distinct content words of four or more letters sharing their first four letters pays multPolyptoton (default 6). Tier-1 caveat, and a broad one: this is a prefix match, not etymology. toast/toasts and sail/sailor are found; sing/sang is not; and silence/silently, which share a genuine root, are found for the right reason entirely by accident.
Ploce is pronounced PLOH-see; antanaclasis, an-tuh-nuh-KLAY-sis. Ploce is the plain repetition of a word for emphasis. Antanaclasis is the sharper version: the word repeats but changes meaning, which is the mechanism of most respectable puns. Epizeuxis (ep-ih-ZOOK-sis) is the immediate-repetition variety — words, words, words.
In play: any repeated word at all, once you own the relevant Inkblot.
In the wild: "Put out the light, and then put out the light" — Shakespeare, Othello. The first light is a candle; the second is Desdemona.
The game scores it: The Pun Gun Inkblot. Ordinarily a composition gains nothing from repeating a word; the Pun Gun makes every repetition beyond the first occurrence pay +8. It stacks freely with The Bookend, The Second Thought, The Refrain and The Anaphora, all of which are repetition by another name. Tier-1 caveat, cheerfully admitted: the game cannot tell antanaclasis from a stutter. It pays for the repetition and trusts you to have meant something.
Ten entries. Syntax as an instrument: not what the words are, but the order and the joinery. The game reads these through parts of speech, which is why several of them are scored by pattern-matching JJ NN or NN CC NN rather than by any understanding of what is being said.
Pronounced kye-AZ-mus. An ABBA structure — two elements stated, then restated in reverse order. When the repeated elements are the same words, the figure is more precisely called antimetabole (an-tee-muh-TAB-uh-lee). Chiasmus makes a sentence feel like a proof, which is why politicians cannot leave it alone.
In play: silver moon shadow black — adjective, noun, noun, adjective.
In the wild: "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" — John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, 1961. That is antimetabole. For chiasmus of structure rather than words: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" — Genesis 9:6, KJV.
The game scores it: The Mirror Inkblot. It scans for any four consecutive words whose parts of speech form an ABBA pattern, where A and B differ, and pays multChiasmus (default 12) — once per composition, however many mirrors you build. Tier-1 caveat: this is grammatical symmetry only. The game has no idea whether the reversal means anything.
Pronounced hye-PER-buh-ton. Words placed out of their expected order — the forest dark for the dark forest. English is a rigid language and resents this, which is exactly why the device works: the displacement marks the phrase as poetry, or as Latin, or as Yoda.
In play: moon silver and shadow dark — noun first, adjective trailing.
In the wild: "Object there was none. Passion there was none." — Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart. The narrator's syntax is coming apart in the same direction as his mind.
The game scores it: The Inversion Inkblot. Every adjacent noun followed by an adjective pays multHyperbaton (default 4). It is the exact mirror of The Heraldic Epithet, which pays for the ordinary order — you may own both, but a given pair of words will only ever satisfy one of them.
Pronounced eye-so-KOH-lon. Successive clauses of equal length and parallel structure. The balance is the effect: matched clauses sound considered, and imply that the thought behind them was symmetrical before the sentence was.
In play: two lines of four words each. The lengths must match exactly.
In the wild: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." — Churchill, 20 August 1940. Three matched phrases, and the last is shortest, which is where the punch is.
The game scores it: The Balance Inkblot. If there are two or more non-empty lines and every one has the same word count, it pays multIsocolon (default 8) — once, flat. Tier-1 caveat: it counts words, not stresses or syllables, and it has no opinion at all about parallel structure.
Pronounced try-KOH-lon. Three parallel elements in a row — the rule of three. Two items read as a pair, four as a list; three is the smallest number that establishes a pattern and completes it in the same breath, which is why it is the most reliable rhythm in rhetoric.
In play: any composition laid out across exactly three lines.
In the wild: "Veni, vidi, vici" — Julius Caesar, reported by Suetonius and Plutarch. Three verbs, equal weight, no conjunctions, no survivors.
The game scores it: The Tricolon Inkblot. A composition of exactly three non-empty lines pays multTricolon (default 10), flat. It pairs naturally with the LIST OF THREE, TERCET and HAIKU Forms, all of which give you three rows to fill.
Pronounced uh-SIN-di-ton. The omission of conjunctions between elements that would ordinarily take them. It accelerates: without and to slow it, a list becomes a series of blows and implies that it could have gone on.
In play: captain plunders treasure swiftly — four content words, not a scrap of grammatical mortar between them.
In the wild: "Veni, vidi, vici" again — the missing ands are the reason it sounds like a report rather than a boast.
The game scores it: The Staccato Inkblot. If the composition has four or more words and every single one is a content word — no articles, no prepositions, no conjunctions, nothing tagged filler — every word pays multStaccato (default 2). It is all or nothing: one stray the and the Inkblot pays zero.
Pronounced pol-ee-SIN-di-ton. The opposite vice, practised deliberately: a conjunction between every element. It slows the line to a plod and confers an air of the biblical, the breathless, or the childish, depending entirely on company.
In play: rum and rope and rust and rain — three conjunctions, which is the minimum the Inkblot accepts.
In the wild: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good" — Genesis 1:3–4, King James Version. The whole chapter proceeds by and.
The game scores it: The Litany Inkblot. It requires three or more conjunctions (and, but, or) in the composition; at that threshold every conjunction pays multLitany (default 4). Below three it pays nothing at all. Note the tension with The Staccato — the two Inkblots are mutually exclusive by construction, and owning both is a wasted seat.
Pronounced hen-DYE-uh-dis, from the Greek for "one through two". Expressing a single complex idea with two nouns joined by and, rather than with a noun and its modifier: sound and fury for furious sound, nice and warm for nicely warm. It spreads one idea across two words and lets both of them be stressed.
In play: blood and iron — noun, conjunction, noun.
In the wild: "full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" — Shakespeare, Macbeth. Also "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" from Hamlet, the example every textbook reaches for.
The game scores it: The Storm and Fury Inkblot. Every noun–conjunction– noun triple pays multHendiadys (default 6). Tier-1 caveat: it detects the shape, not the unity of sense. cat and dog is two animals and scores exactly the same as a genuine hendiadys.
Pronounced ZOYG-muh (or ZYOOG-muh), from the Greek for "yoke". One word — usually a verb — governing two or more others, often in incompatible senses. The strict term for the comic version, where the governed senses clash, is syllepsis (sih-LEP-sis); in practice everyone says zeugma and the lexicographers have given up.
In play: the captain drinks rum tea and blood — one verb hauling four nouns.
In the wild: "Or stain her honour, or her new brocade" — Pope, The Rape of the Lock. And, at greater length: "Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated, and went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan chair." — Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers.
The game scores it: The Yoke Inkblot. It pays multZeugma (default 10) when the composition contains exactly one verb and three or more nouns — a crude but surprisingly effective proxy for a single verb doing too much work. Two verbs and it pays nothing.
Pronounced EP-ih-thet. A descriptive term attached to a name or noun, often formulaically. In oral poetry the fixed epithet is a metrical convenience as much as a description; in prose it is the fastest way to characterise a thing before the sentence has finished introducing it.
In play: silver moon, ancient cathedral, scurvy pirate — adjective braced directly in front of its noun.
In the wild: Homer's stock epithets, rendered into English as rosy-fingered Dawn and swift-footed Achilles. Note: the exact English wording varies by translator — these are the conventional renderings, not a quotation from any one edition.
The game scores it: The Heraldic Epithet Inkblot. Every adjacent adjective-then-noun pair pays multEpithet (default 4). Stack adjectives and only the one touching the noun counts: in cold sharp bone, the pair is sharp bone.
Pronounced KEN-ing. A compressed compound metaphor standing in for a plain noun, characteristic of Old English and Old Norse verse: whale-road for the sea, bone-house for the body. It is a riddle in miniature, and a way of paying the alliterative line's rent.
In play: sea captain, storm shadow, bone shroud — noun bolted to noun.
In the wild: Beowulf gives us hronrād — literally "whale-road", the sea — and bānhūs, "bone-house", the body. Note: the English forms are the standard literal glosses of the Old English compounds, not a quotation from a particular translation.
The game scores it: The Kenning Inkblot. Every adjacent noun-then-noun pair pays multKenning (default 4). Tier-1 caveat: it detects the compound, not the metaphor. sea captain is a job, not a kenning, and is paid regardless.
Nine entries. Devices of meaning rather than of sound or order. The game has no semantics whatsoever, so every one of these is scored from hand-applied dictionary tags — a human decided that raven is concrete and sorrow is not, and the machine simply counts.
Language naming things that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled — a candle, a cannon, a rope. It is the first advice in every writing manual because it is the only one that reliably works: a specific object is remembered, an abstraction is agreed with and forgotten.
In play: the pirate finds the doubloon — every concrete noun pays.
In the wild: "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens" — William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow. Sixteen words, no abstractions, no argument.
The game scores it: base property. Every word tagged concrete pays multConcrete (default 4), and concrete words are highlighted in moss green in the result panel. The SENTENCE Form's stated bonus is that concrete imagery hits harder.
A verb carrying its own manner — slithers, shrieks, swaggers — as against a colourless one propped up by an adverb. The strong verb is the cheapest upgrade available to any sentence, and the reason most adverbs are a confession.
In play: the serpent slithers — and note that no limp alternative is even dealt to you: the dictionary stocks the vivid verbs and leaves the beige ones at home.
In the wild: "He clasps the crag with crooked hands" — Tennyson, The Eagle. Clasps, not holds.
The game scores it: base property. Every word tagged vivid pays multVivid (default 3) and is highlighted in sealing-wax red. Around twenty verbs carry the tag; plunders, bleeds, haunts and crumbles are among them, while walks, runs and finds are pointedly not.
A noun naming something with no physical existence — hope, fate, sorrow, decorum. The natural opposite of concrete imagery, and normally the weaker choice, which is why the game charges you an Inkblot for the privilege of making it pay.
In play: hope and sorrow — two abstractions, both tagged.
In the wild: "'Hope' is the thing with feathers—" — Emily Dickinson. The abstraction is named and then immediately given a body, which is how it is properly done.
The game scores it: The Philosopher Inkblot. Every word tagged abstract pays multAbstract (default 4) and is highlighted in heliotrope. The roster is small — truth, hope, fate, love, hate, silence, sorrow, scandal, decorum — so the Inkblot rewards a particular kind of composition rather than a general one.
Naming a colour: the most immediate sensory detail available, and the one that survives translation. Synaesthesia (sin-es-THEE-zhuh) is the related and grander device — describing one sense in the vocabulary of another, as in a loud shirt or a warm voice — which the game gestures at with the Inkblot's name rather than actually detecting.
In play: crimson blood and golden treasure — two colour words.
In the wild: the chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale" in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which spends its length arguing that a colour can be a terror.
The game scores it: The Synesthete Inkblot. Every word tagged color pays multColor (default 4) and is highlighted in old gold. The roster is black, red, silver, green, blue, golden, crimson and amber.
Pronounced SIM-ih-lee. An explicit comparison, flagged by like or as. Because the comparison is announced, a simile is more precise and less risky than a metaphor — and correspondingly less startling. An extended or Homeric simile runs on for several lines and becomes a small landscape of its own.
In play: like iron like rust — like before a noun, twice, which is what the SIMILE CHAIN Form wants.
In the wild: "O my Luve is like a red, red rose" — Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose.
The game scores it: the SIMILE CHAIN Form. It matches when like or as is immediately followed by a noun, at least twice. The dictionary carries both connectives as filler for exactly this purpose. Homer's extended similes have no equivalent here; the Gauntlet's timer would not permit them.
An identification rather than a comparison: not like a thing but is the thing. It is the more dangerous instrument — it asserts an equivalence and dares you to object — and it is the engine of nearly all figurative language, including most words you no longer notice are figurative.
In play: the captain is a storm — noun phrase, is, noun phrase.
In the wild: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" — Shakespeare, As You Like It.
The game scores it: the METAPHOR Form. It requires a BE verb (is, are, was) that is neither the first nor the last word, with at least one noun or pronoun before it and at least one noun after it. Tier-1 caveat: the game cannot tell a metaphor from a statement of fact. the captain is a sailor scores identically and is merely true.
Pronounced an-TITH-uh-sis. Two opposed ideas set in parallel, so the structure enacts the conflict — light against dark, folly against wisdom. The parallelism is essential: without it you have a contradiction rather than an antithesis.
In play: love and hate, light and dark, day and night — any of the recognised opposing pairs, held in one phrase.
In the wild: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, which continues in the same balance for another hundred words or so.
The game scores it: the CONTRADICTION boss Form. It matches when the composition contains both members of a recognised antonym pair. The pairs are fixed and few: light/dark, bright/dark, day/night, love/hate, hope/sorrow, rises/falls, big/small, swiftly/slowly.
Litotes is pronounced LYE-tuh-teez or lye-TOH-teez. Saying a thing by denying its opposite — not bad, no small matter. English understatement in its purest form: a refusal that lands harder than the assertion would have, because the listener does the work.
In play: never, no and not are each tagged, and each pays.
In the wild: "'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough" — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio is dying and is still doing figures.
The game scores it: The Stonewall Inkblot. Every word tagged negation — no, not, never — pays multNegation (default 5) and is highlighted in slate. Tier-1 caveat: the game detects the negating word, not litotes. It has no means of knowing whether you denied the opposite of anything.
The classical name is erotesis, eh-roh-TEE-sis; the variety where the speaker asks and then answers is hypophora, hye-POF-uh-ruh. A question posed for effect rather than for an answer. It recruits the listener: having framed the reply themselves, they are harder pressed to disown it.
In play: why the captain weeps — the interrogative pays.
In the wild: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" — Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, which is a rhetorical question and litotes at once.
The game scores it: The Inquisitor Inkblot. Every word tagged question — who, what, where, when, why, how — pays multQuestion (default 5) and is highlighted in inquiry blue. They are classed as pronominal filler so that they do not distort the content-word Forms.
Six entries. Matters of word choice and bearing rather than of any single figure — plus one entry that is not a virtue at all.
The grammatical mortar: articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and the forms of to be. They carry no imagery and every writing manual since Strunk tells you to cut them. They are also what makes a sentence a sentence, and the Gauntlet — which is more forgiving than Strunk — sells you an Inkblot that pays for them.
In play: the, a, of, with, by, and, is, like. Twenty-odd words tagged filler, plus the negations and interrogatives.
In the wild: "Omit needless words." — William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style, rule 17. Advice worth taking everywhere except here.
The game scores it: The Editor's Eye Inkblot, which does two things. Every filler word pays +2, and filler words stop counting toward the minimum composition length — so with a minimum of three, the storm and the sea counts as two words for validity while paying for four pieces of glue. It is a defensive Inkblot masquerading as an offensive one.
Not a classical figure but a real principle: the first word of a sentence is the most exposed position in it, and the last is the most emphatic. What you put first sets the frame before the reader has any defences up.
In play: put your heaviest word first, not third.
In the wild: "Call me Ishmael." — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Three words, and the imperative arrives before the name.
The game scores it: The Critic's Pen Inkblot. The first word of the composition receives triple base value — mechanically, it adds a further 2 × multBase (default 3), for +6. Flat, regardless of which word it is; the Pen is indifferent to merit, like most critics.
The classical name is enumeratio, ee-noo-mer-AH-tee-oh; the general practice of piling on synonyms is amplificatio. Heaping up descriptive terms for one subject, so the excess itself becomes characterisation. Overdone it is a thicket; that is the point of the name.
In play: the pompous proper prudent pristine baron — four adjectives, and an alliteration bonus thrown in.
In the wild: "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" — Dickens, A Christmas Carol, on Scrooge. Seven adjectives where one would have done, and it is the best sentence in the book.
The game scores it: The Thicket of Adjectives Inkblot. Every word tagged JJ pays +4, uncapped. Note it counts adjectives anywhere, not only in runs — but runs are how you get many of them.
The discipline of saying it in fewer words. Not a figure but a stance, and the one modern prose style is built on: the short declarative sentence claims to be reporting rather than arguing, and is trusted accordingly.
In play: five words or fewer doubles your total. raven haunts the silent shore is five words and every one of them earning.
In the wild: Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg theory" — that what is omitted strengthens what remains — set out in Death in the Afternoon (1932). Caution: the famous six-word story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is routinely attributed to Hemingway, and that attribution is not supported by evidence. Treat it as folklore.
The game scores it: The Hemingway Inkblot. A composition of five words or fewer (and at least one) has its total doubled. Because it applies after the Form multiplier, it is the single most explosive Inkblot in the game — and it fights every Form that wants length.
Pronounced KOH-pee-uh; Latin for "abundance". Deliberate fullness — the rhetorical resource of saying a thing at length, with variation, until the sheer scale of it does the persuading. Erasmus wrote a whole textbook on it, De copia (1512), which includes 195 ways of saying "your letter pleased me greatly".
In play: eight words or more, at which point the Orator takes his fee.
In the wild: the opening paragraph of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities — ten balanced clauses before the first full stop — is copia doing real work.
The game scores it: The Orator Inkblot. A composition of eight or more words gains +25% to its total. It is the exact opposite of Hemingway, and the two cannot both fire on the same composition.
Pronounced MAL-uh-prop-ism, after Mrs. Malaprop. The substitution of a similar- sounding word for the intended one, with disastrous and precise comic effect. The device is older than its name — Shakespeare's Dogberry does it throughout Much Ado About Nothing — but Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop supplied the label.
In play: you cannot actually build one; the dictionary will not let you. The Inkblot is named for the failure mode, not the figure.
In the wild: "He is the very pineapple of politeness!" (for pinnacle) and "as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile" (for alligator) — Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1775).
The game scores it: Mrs. Malaprop Inkblot, alone among the forty in being handled inside the scorer rather than as an ordinary effect. When your composition fails to match the round's Form, she salvages 75% of the Form bonus instead of the zero you had coming. She is insurance, priced accordingly, and does nothing whatever on a successful round.
Thirteen entries — ten in the ordinary rotation and three boss Forms, marked below, which are excluded from the random draw and reachable only by explicit choice. A matched Form multiplies your running total by multForm (default ×1.5) before Inkblots are applied. Each Form declares its own compose rows; a multi-row Form is the only way to score the line-based Inkblots.
Rule: construct a grammatically acceptable sentence (subject + verb). Bonus: concrete imagery hits harder.
The baseline Form and the most forgiving. Two words will do it.
In play: the captain plunders.
Matches when: the composition has at least two words and, scanning left to right, a noun or pronoun is found and then a verb or BE form after it. Tier-1 caveat: this is a subject-then-verb check, not a parser. Agreement, tense and sense are nobody's business but yours.
Rule: compose a phrase where most content words share an initial sound. Bonus: each alliterating pair chains damage.
In play: silent serpent slithers softly.
Matches when: there are at least two content words, and the number sharing the first content word's initial sound is at least 60% of all content words (and at least two). Note the anchor: the sound is set by whatever content word comes first, so a stray leading raven can sink an otherwise perfect line of s.
Rule: two lines; the last word of each must rhyme with the other. Bonus: rhymes ricochet for a second hit.
In play: the raven haunts the night / the candle burns bright.
Matches when: both lines are non-empty and their final words rhyme by the orthographic matcher. Identical words do not rhyme with themselves.
In the wild: the closing couplet of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 — "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
Rule: three lines, 5 / 7 / 5 syllables, tolerance ±1 per line. Bonus: burst damage on submission.
In play: silver moon rises (5) / the ancient serpent slithers (7) / the shadow crumbles (5).
Matches when: there are three rows and each row's total syllable count is within 1 of its target. Each row displays its target while composing.
In the wild: Bashō's frog poem — "an old pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water". Note: this is one of dozens of English renderings; the wording varies by translator, and no single version is canonical.
Rule: begin with a verb. Issue your demand plainly. Bonus: staggers the foe; bonus on first strike.
In play: drowns the pirate — the dictionary's verbs are third-person, so the imperative reads a little oddly. The scorer does not mind.
Matches when: the first word is tagged VB. That is the entire test.
In the wild: "Let there be light" — Genesis 1:3, King James Version.
Rule: [noun phrase] IS / ARE / WAS [noun phrase]. Two unlike things made one. Bonus: pierces enemy lines.
In play: the captain is a storm.
Matches when: a BE word appears that is neither first nor last, with at least one noun or pronoun before it and at least one noun after it. See Metaphor above for the full entry and its caveat.
Rule: three items, parallel in structure. The classical rhetorical triad. Bonus: triple-shot.
In play: storm / shadow / silence — one word per row is sufficient.
Matches when: at least three rows are non-empty. Parallel structure is encouraged and not enforced. See Tricolon.
Rule: eight or more words, most sharing one repeated initial sound. Bonus: massive area damage — strikes the whole field.
In play: the salty sailor sails the shifty schooner to shore — nine words, six of them content, four on s.
Matches when: there are eight or more words, at least three of them content words, and the single most common initial sound among the content words occurs at least three times and covers at least 60% of them. Unlike the ALLITERATION Form, the dominant sound is found rather than anchored to the first word — so a stray leading consonant costs you nothing here.
In the wild: "She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore" — traditional; the attribution to Terry Sullivan's 1908 song is for the popular version, not for the tongue-twister itself.
Rule: three lines, ABA rhyme — lines 1 and 3 rhyme; line 2 stands apart. Bonus: sustained — the rhyme echoes across three beats.
In play: line 1 ending night, line 2 ending storm, line 3 ending light.
Matches when: all three rows are non-empty, the last words of rows 1 and 3 rhyme, and the last word of row 2 does not rhyme with row 1. The negative condition is the hard part: pick a row-2 ending that is clearly unrelated.
In the wild: Dante's Divine Comedy is written throughout in terza rima — interlocking ABA BCB CDC tercets — for roughly fourteen thousand lines.
Rule: two or more similes in a row — "like X, like Y" (or "as X"). Bonus: multi-pierce — each simile punches through a rank.
In play: like iron like rust like rain.
Matches when: the pattern like or as immediately followed by a noun occurs at least twice. See Simile.
Rule: the phrase must hold two opposites at once (antithesis). Bonus: antithesis detonates — a boss-breaker.
In play: love and hate — or the light and the dark.
Matches when: the composition contains both members of one of eight fixed antonym pairs: light/dark, bright/dark, day/night, love/hate, hope/sorrow, rises/falls, big/small, swiftly/slowly. See Antithesis.
Rule: the sequence of words must read the same forwards and backwards. Bonus: the Ouroboros — the line devours its own tail, reflecting damage.
Note that this is a palindrome of words, not of letters. You are not being asked for A man, a plan, a canal: Panama; you are being asked to mirror the word order around a centre.
In play: sea captain sea. Longer: storm and moon and storm.
Matches when: there are three or more words, at least two distinct words (a line of one word repeated is rejected as trivial), and word i equals word n−i throughout. It also satisfies Epanalepsis for free.
In the wild: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" — composed by Leigh Mercer, published in Notes and Queries, 1948. Caution: the older "Able was I ere I saw Elba" is traditionally attributed to Napoleon and that attribution is certainly spurious — he did not speak English well enough.
Rule: tell a whole story in exactly six words — no more, no fewer. Bonus: the Epitaph — a life in one breath, landing one devastating blow.
In play: the pirate drowns his golden treasure.
Matches when: the composition contains exactly six words, counted across all rows. Nothing else is examined. It is the cleanest test in the game and the hardest Form to make good.
In the wild: the six-word story is a genuine modern form popularised by SMITH Magazine's memoir project from 2006 onward. Caution: its famous origin story — Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" — is not supported by evidence and should be treated as legend. See Brevity.
The dictionary is the whole of the game's linguistic knowledge: a few hundred hand-tagged words, each with a part of speech, a syllable count, and a set of tags. There is no parser and no external NLP. If a word is not in the dictionary it cannot be dealt, and if a tag is not applied by hand the property does not exist.
| Code | Meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|
NN | noun | captain, raven, doubloon, sorrow |
VB | verb | plunders, slithers, ponders, roars |
JJ | adjective | scurvy, pompous, crimson, bleak |
RB | adverb | swiftly, silently, primly, softly |
DT | determiner | the, a, an, this, that, no, not, never |
PR | pronoun | my, her, his, he, she, they, who, what |
IN | preposition | with, on, in, of, by, to, like, as |
CC | conjunction | and, but, or |
BE | form of to be | is, was, are |
NN, VB, JJ and RB are the content words. Everything else is grammatical glue, and most sound devices skip it.
| Tag | Meaning | Scored by |
|---|---|---|
filler | grammatical glue | The Editor's Eye; excluded from most sound devices |
concrete | a thing of the senses | base scoring (multConcrete) |
vivid | a verb with its own manner | base scoring (multVivid) |
abstract | a thing of the mind | The Philosopher |
onoma | sounds like its meaning | The Onomatopoeia Engine |
color | names a colour | The Synesthete |
negation | no, not, never | The Stonewall |
question | who, what, where, when, why, how | The Inquisitor |
nautical | themed pack | pack filtering only |
parlour | themed pack | pack filtering only |
gothic | themed pack | pack filtering only |
Selecting a themed pack in the tuning drawer narrows the deal to that pack's words plus all the grammatical glue. nautical is salt and larceny, parlour is tea and social violence, gothic is ravens and regret.
Wordsmith's Gauntlet · The Critic remains unimpressed.