The wrong answers are real definitions of real words in the same part of speech, which is what makes them hard — none of them is nonsense you can rule out on sight.
Guess the definition is a free multiple-choice vocabulary quiz with 24 rounds. Each round shows one English word and 4 definitions: one is the word's own, and the other three are genuine definitions of other entries that share its part of speech, which is what stops the wrong answers from being obvious. The pool is 1,191 words and every round links to the full dictionary entry.
Four definitions. One belongs to the word; the other three belong to other entries.
Which definition belongs to
death
Tab to move between the four, Enter or Space to choose. Keys 1 to 4 work too.
Read the word at the top of the round. Its part of speech and how common it is are shown beside it.
Read all four definitions. Every one of them is a real WordNet definition of a real entry in the same part of speech.
Choose the one that belongs to the word — click it, or press its number key, or Tab to it and press Enter.
The round settles on your first choice. There is no second guess: the correct definition is marked and the one you picked is marked too.
Open the full entry to see the word's other senses, its pronunciation and its synonyms, then move to the next round.
Every round is already in the page when it loads, so the quiz never pauses to fetch the next question and works with the network switched off.
The pool is 1,191 single words from the everyday collections, each with exactly one part of speech and a definition between 22 and 118 characters that does not contain the word it defines. Splitting the pool by part of speech gives 435 adjectives, 341 nouns, 270 verbs, 145 adverbs.
Each round takes the target, then walks its own part-of-speech list in an order seeded from the target’s slug and takes the first three entries whose definitions are distinct from each other and never mention the target. The four options are then shuffled with a third seed, which is why the right answer is not in the same slot twice running.
The words, definitions and semantic fields in this game come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness bands are measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.