Krillion Recorded answers
357 recorded answers
How to approach it
The productive route is systematic rather than associative. Draw up a list of domains one at a time — manufacturing, medicine, cookery, ceremonies, clothing, gardening, toys, religion, transport — and for each, force out three or four rounded objects that plausibly carry the name. Write down compounds as well as single words, since the phrasing often hides in a modifier plus the target word. Then prune: strike anything used in a sport, a game with winners, or physical training, and strike brand names and fiction. Keep the entries you can define in one clause, because a term you can gloss is a term the reveal can also list. Finally, rank what remains by how rarely you have heard it and submit the strangest defensible items first. Volume matters less than precision.
Get a hint
Start from the shape rather than the activity: a ball is any mass worked into a round form, so sweep through trades, household objects, ceremonies and the natural world.
A little more
Move room by room mentally, then trade by trade — workshop, kitchen, laboratory, garden, wardrobe, celebration — and ask what rounded object in each of those places carries that name.
One step further
Aim for the obscure end: technical vocabulary from engineering and anatomy, old ceremonial names and regional words for small round portions all score far better than the everyday rounded objects anyone could list.
Reveal answers 357
- Potato ballRare60points
- PuffballRare60points
- Puzzle ballRare60points
- Root ballRare60points
- Roulette ballRare60points
- Royal ballRare60points
- Rum ballRare60points
- School ballRare60points
- Scrubber ballRare60points
- Seed ballRare60points
- Sensory ballRare60points
- Sesame ballRare60points
- Silver ballRare60points
- Skee-BallRare60points
- Slime ballRare60points
- Sock ballRare60points
- SpitballRare60points
- Sponge ballRare60points
- Tea ballRare60points
- Times Square ballRare60points
- Toy ballRare60points
- TrackballRare60points
- Vegetable ballRare60points
- Wooden ballRare60points
- Zorb ballRare60points
- Ball bearingSchooler30points
- Ball of yarnSchooler30points
- Ball pit ballSchooler30points
- Beach ballSchooler30points
- CannonballSchooler30points
- Cheese ballSchooler30points
- Chocolate ballSchooler30points
- Christmas ballSchooler30points
- Cotton ballSchooler30points
- Crystal ballSchooler30points
- Dryer ballSchooler30points
- Exercise ballSchooler30points
- EyeballSchooler30points
- FireballSchooler30points
- GumballSchooler30points
- HairballSchooler30points
- Hamster ballSchooler30points
- Juggling ballSchooler30points
- Magic 8 BallSchooler30points
- MarbleSchooler30points
- MothballSchooler30points
- PinballSchooler30points
- Poké BallSchooler30points
- Rice ballSchooler30points
- Rubber band ballSchooler30points
Why these answers count
The scoring curve is steep at the top and flat in the middle, which tells you rarity beats volume. A single entry took the full 100 points — Time ball, the descending sphere that drops to mark noon — and it is exactly the kind of answer the reveal rewards: a real, dictionary-level sense of the word that almost nobody reaches for. The 221 entries sitting at 85 points are the same species, one notch less surprising: scientific and technical compounds such as Ball lightning and Buckyball, ceremonial and scholarly terms such as Ballot ball, and borrowed words such as Dorodango all earned the second tier. The 90 answers at 60 points were evidently the obvious end of the spectrum — round objects anyone could name in ten seconds. Nothing here rewards writing down every sphere in the house; the points track how far your answer sits from the first thing a hundred people would say. When two candidates feel equally valid, submit the one you had to look up, because obscurity that can still be defined is what the top band is made of.