Words for 20 questions

One player thinks of something, and the rest have twenty yes-or-no questions to find out what it is. The game needs a word that has plenty to ask about, so these lists draw on food, animals, countries, shops and science rather than abstract nouns.

154 words

Rules in short

1. The thinker picks a word, either from their head or from the generator, and tells the others only whether it is an animal, a thing or a place.
2. Everyone else takes turns asking yes-or-no questions.
3. The thinker may only answer yes, no, or sometimes.
4. A question can be a guess, but a wrong guess counts as one of the twenty.
5. If the group guesses within twenty questions, they win. Otherwise the thinker reveals the word and wins.

Random word generator

Words by difficulty

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What makes a good word

Easy words can be cracked in ten questions. Medium words need a smart first question about size or origin. Hard words are phrases and rarely fall inside twenty, which makes them the right pick for a thinker who wants to win.

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