Krillion Recorded answers
6,313 recorded answers
How to approach it
Reverse the usual move: instead of hunting for one item, generate a wide field of candidates quickly, then test each against the date. Choose a broad arena of old practical life — the household, the building site, the workshop, the battlefield, the sickroom — and jot down five or six concrete things from each, written with the precise term a specialist would use rather than the everyday word. Scrutiny comes next: does a written source place the thing before 1500, and is it an object, a technique or a system rather than a plant, a dish or a drink? Width first, judgement afterwards. Since the reveal rewards volume, keep extending the shortlist and note spelling variants of every entry, because a narrow technical label is often the form the list accepts.
Get a hint
Begin with the working capital of ordinary life in antiquity: the tools, containers, fastenings and structures people handled daily rather than the ceremonial pieces kept for the powerful.
A little more
Narrow next to problems that demanded a designed solution — keeping accounts, lifting water, marking the hour, landing a blow in combat, closing a wound — and ask whether a documented remedy predates 1500.
One step further
Finally, favour the specialist's label over the household word: a single implement, one named building element or a particular notation usually sits in reference works under a term nobody says aloud today.
Reveal answers 6,313
- DeskRare60points
- DiaperRare60points
- DicingRare60points
- DictionaryRare60points
- DidgeridooRare60points
- DistillationRare60points
- Diving bellRare60points
- Dog collarRare60points
- Dog sledRare60points
- DomeRare60points
- DominoesRare60points
- Door boltRare60points
- Double-entry bookkeepingRare60points
- Dragon boatRare60points
- Draughts (checkers)Rare60points
- DrawbridgeRare60points
- DrillRare60points
- Drinking strawRare60points
- DrumstickRare60points
- Dugout canoeRare60points
- EarringRare60points
- EarthenwareRare60points
- Egg cupRare60points
- ElevatorRare60points
- EmbroideryRare60points
- EncyclopediaRare60points
- Engagement ringRare60points
- EngravingRare60points
- EnvelopeRare60points
- EraserRare60points
- FermentationRare60points
- FerryRare60points
- FertilizerRare60points
- FiddleRare60points
- FileRare60points
- Fire arrowRare60points
- Fire drillRare60points
- Fire engineRare60points
- Fire lanceRare60points
- FirecrackerRare60points
- Fish hookRare60points
- Fishing boatRare60points
- Fishing lineRare60points
- Fishing netRare60points
- Fishing reelRare60points
- FlailRare60points
- FlamethrowerRare60points
- Flint and steelRare60points
- FlowerpotRare60points
- Flush toiletRare60points
Why these answers count
The scoring here is unusually flat: a single recorded pick took the full hundred, while more than five thousand earned eighty-five and seven hundred more stopped at sixty. That shape points to a closed list graded by rarity rather than by correctness — nearly everything submitted was accepted and then levelled. The lone maximum went to Pythagorean cup, an ingenious contrivance few players would reach for. The eighty-five band is vast and reads like a catalogue of specialist vocabulary: Ab anbar, Abat-son, Abatis, Abjad numerals, Acinaces, Acoustic jar, Acta Diurna. Each is a real thing from before 1500, yet each sits inside a niche — water supply, architecture, fortification, notation, armament — so finding one depends on knowing that corner of the field, not on luck. The sixty-point tier, seven hundred strong, probably collects the more familiar choices that many players hit at once. The practical lesson: obvious picks keep you in the middle of the pack, and the extra points come from the technical term.