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
- GuohuaDeep Cut85points
- GuoliangDeep Cut85points
- GuoqiangDeep Cut85points
- HaDeep Cut85points
- HabibDeep Cut85points
- HabibaDeep Cut85points
- HaiDeep Cut85points
- HaiboDeep Cut85points
- HaitaoDeep Cut85points
- HaiyanDeep Cut85points
- HaiyingDeep Cut85points
- HajiDeep Cut85points
- HalimaDeep Cut85points
- HalynaDeep Cut85points
- HananDeep Cut85points
- HangDeep Cut85points
- HariDeep Cut85points
- HaticeDeep Cut85points
- HawaDeep Cut85points
- HebaDeep Cut85points
- HeinzDeep Cut85points
- HieuDeep Cut85points
- HiroshiDeep Cut85points
- HoaDeep Cut85points
- HoangDeep Cut85points
- HongDeep Cut85points
- HongmeiDeep Cut85points
- HongweiDeep Cut85points
- HongyanDeep Cut85points
- HosseinDeep Cut85points
- HuanDeep Cut85points
- HuiDeep Cut85points
- HuiminDeep Cut85points
- HungDeep Cut85points
- HuongDeep Cut85points
- HuyDeep Cut85points
- IgorDeep Cut85points
- IsaDeep Cut85points
- IssaDeep Cut85points
- JamilaDeep Cut85points
- JianfengDeep Cut85points
- JianguoDeep Cut85points
- JianhuaDeep Cut85points
- JianhuiDeep Cut85points
- JianjunDeep Cut85points
- JianminDeep Cut85points
- JianmingDeep Cut85points
- JianpingDeep Cut85points
- JianweiDeep Cut85points
- JianxinDeep 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.