This might shock you, but I don’t actually love big words. Rather than elbowing pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, I prefer short, evocative slashes to anything my readers might need to sound out. Let’s be real for a second: Did you actually say the word in the previous sentence, or did you blip over it like one more nickname for Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? Exactly.

Five-Dollar Words, then, is a game that I am unexpectedly terrible at. Designed by Amabel and Mary Holland as the freebie for this year’s Hollandays Sale, it peddles itself as a game for sesquipedalianists and pedants. Better yet, it has a rule that prevents anybody from dragging out antidisestablishmentarianism as their word of choice.

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