Addicted

I am addicted to FreeRice. It's now one of my permanent tabs open on Firefox whenever I log in. It's a website with a simple vocabulary game that donates ten grains of rice for every vocab question you get right. So you can play, learn new words, and feed people at the same time. It generates revenue by displaying ads that change with every question.

How the rest of it works is that there are 50 vocabulary levels, and the game has a system that adjusts to your vocabulary level so that you will find the words challenging, but not insane. Every three words guessed right advances you up one level, and each word wrong takes you down a notch. For instance, I got to level 49 once but I actually average at 42-45.

It is sometimes possible to guess the answer. Actually I do it more than half the time. After playing through 300 words (which is what I did), a pattern begins to emerge (at least to compulsive categorizers like me). Some words are international, i.e they come from a variety of languages and cultures while some words are scientific/technical.

Amyloid means: starchy, unworried, ready, agreeable
Mufti means: civilian dress, smell, voraciousness, mass

So amyloid sounds like something you would hear in science class (the technical part, I think, is that--oid is a Greek suffix). The answer is most likely starchy, the only word choice describing the characteristic of a substance and not a person. If you actually do take science and know the enzyme amylase, then this should be the obvious answer already, of course. Whereas mufti just doesn't sound like anything English. So I'm going with civilian dress, the only word choice that describes an aspect of culture.

Here's an example on word roots.

Inimitable means: worrisome, matchless, outstanding, permissive

Gee I don't know this. But there's something that looks like a prefix--that's the "in". If I take that out I get "imitable" which has the same root as a word I do know: "imitation." The "able" means "can be imitated". But "in" means the opposite. So, "matchless" is the answer. (This is the Princeton SAT Guide method of getting through vocab). I guess most of my words by this, or by intuition. It does require a wide basic vocabulary first, or a knowledge of word roots.

Intuition is the least reliable way, but I use it anyway because it's fun. It doesn't mean that I guess blindly. I've always thought intuition is made up of a collection of weak inferences derived from data that is either perceived subliminally or regarded as too insignificant to matter on its own. So let's try to see what we can mine from a word.

Flense means: drink, strip blubber from, offset, cease

(I haven't answered the question yet). My intuition would work like this. Flense sounds so horribly impersonal. I don' t think it can refer to drinking. (I repeat the word out loud a few times.) The sibilant 's' doesn't sound like there is a definite end to the word (the 's' in cease is actually pronounced more like a 'z'), so I also eliminate cease. Words generally sound like what they mean. Lastly, it sounds more like a verb than a noun (short vowel and you can't say it lazily, if you notice) and though I'm not sure if "offset" can be used as a verb, I'll go with the obvious verb. Besides, it's the longest answer and one should always choose the longest answer when in doubt for a multiple choice.

And I've just clicked the answer "strip blubber from" and it turns out that it's correct! Of course it doesn't always work. I usually never think about my intuition and click my answer after glancing at the words. Maybe subliminal thought works a lot faster than conscious thinking. Unfortunately there's no way to test what goes on beneath the surface in a reliable experiment. I mean, for all you know, I could be pulling your leg in constructing such elaborate arguments about how I think I come up with an answer when I am technically guessing.

For the rest of the words I regret to say that I have not found a way to guess them yet because I rely on a combination of French (just a 100-word vocabulary in French makes all the difference; that's how much English was affected by the Norman conquest) and literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare. There are plenty of word roots there. And some of the words are actually from Renaissance times.