Krillion Recorded answers
997 recorded answers
How to approach it
Work from demography outwards. Rank the world's major naming systems by the number of people who actually carry them, then ask which individual forms sit at the very top of each one, because a name only needs to be frequent inside a large pool to survive a thousand-entry cut-off. Cross out anything globally famous: those are the picks every player makes, and they pay the least. Then favour the awkward middle, a form that is unremarkable in its home region but almost never encountered by outsiders, especially a clipped or transliterated spelling. Verify the candidate is a given name rather than a surname or a title, check that the spelling is a real recorded variant, and submit it without adding a second element.
Get a hint
Start with population arithmetic: any naming pool tied to a very large population is bound to place dozens of entries inside a thousand-name cut-off.
A little more
Steer away from the names that turn up constantly in mainstream news and entertainment; the middle and lower bands of such a list are dominated by forms that are everyday somewhere else and striking where you live.
One step further
Short one- and two-syllable forms, including clipped transliterations that look unfinished to a mainstream reader, cluster near the bottom, so an odd-looking minimal spelling is a serious candidate.
Reveal answers 997
- KrzysztofOne in a Krillion100points
- ADeep Cut85points
- AbdelDeep Cut85points
- AbdoDeep Cut85points
- AbdoulayeDeep Cut85points
- AbdullahiDeep Cut85points
- AbubakarDeep Cut85points
- AdamaDeep Cut85points
- AdamuDeep Cut85points
- AdelDeep Cut85points
- AgusDeep Cut85points
- AhmetDeep Cut85points
- AiDeep Cut85points
- AichaDeep Cut85points
- AlaaDeep Cut85points
- AleksandrDeep Cut85points
- AleksandraDeep Cut85points
- AlekseyDeep Cut85points
- AlexandreDeep Cut85points
- AlexeyDeep Cut85points
- AliyuDeep Cut85points
- AmadouDeep Cut85points
- AmalDeep Cut85points
- AmarDeep Cut85points
- AminDeep Cut85points
- AminataDeep Cut85points
- AnDeep Cut85points
- AnastasiyaDeep Cut85points
- AndreiDeep Cut85points
- AndreyDeep Cut85points
- AnhDeep Cut85points
- AnilDeep Cut85points
- AnwarDeep Cut85points
- ArifDeep Cut85points
- ArturDeep Cut85points
- ArtyomDeep Cut85points
- ArunDeep Cut85points
- AshaDeep Cut85points
- AshokDeep Cut85points
- AshrafDeep Cut85points
- AsmaDeep Cut85points
- AsmaaDeep Cut85points
- AungDeep Cut85points
- AyaDeep Cut85points
- AyşeDeep Cut85points
- BabuDeep Cut85points
- BasantiDeep Cut85points
- BashirDeep Cut85points
- BekeleDeep Cut85points
- BernadetteDeep Cut85points
Why these answers count
The reveal carries 997 entries and 867 of them clear sixty points, so the scale is compressed near the ceiling and almost any genuine member of the global thousand gets paid something. A single slot at one hundred went to Krzysztof, which reads as the least guessable qualifying entry rather than the rarest name overall. The eighty-five band is enormous, 492 answers, and it is populated by Abdel, Ayşe, Abubakar and Aminata, forms that are everyday across large populations yet rarely surface in mainstream Western media. That width is the useful part: the band is broad enough to be hittable and obscure enough to pay close to the maximum. The 374 answers on sixty points sit at the opposite end, the comfortable picks that occur to nearly everyone and therefore earn the least. Rarity pays because points track how few players reach a given answer, so the profitable zone is a name that is ordinary somewhere populous and unfamiliar elsewhere.