Daily corporate jargon quiz

How the corporate jargon quiz scores

A right answer is worth 100 points, plus a speed bonus. The bonus starts at 50 when the phrase appears and loses 5 a second, so it’s gone after 10 seconds. A wrong answer scores nothing, however fast you clicked, and five questions make a top score of 750.

Everyone gets the same five on the same date, and the set changes at midnight where you are. A player in Sydney meets tomorrow’s five while New York is still on today’s, so Sydney can spoil tomorrow for New York.

Finish all five and your streak goes up by one. Miss a day and it starts again at 1. After today’s five, practice rounds draw from the rest of the bank and count toward neither your streak nor your best score.

Why one set a day

Josh Wardle kept Wordle to one puzzle a day so it felt scarce and took about three minutes. In May 2024 LinkedIn built its first three puzzles the same way, one a day, a few minutes each, with a streak. Five phrases at ten seconds of bonus each fit inside the queue for the coffee machine, with time left over to complain about the coffee.

What goes into the five

The bank holds over 100 phrases. There’s meeting talk, email lines, acronyms, job-ad red flags and the corporate buzzwords that top the hate lists. Each one comes inside a sentence you’d hear at work, usually from someone about to ask for something. The three wrong answers are what the words would mean taken literally, or what a colleague might guess on a Monday.

Each answer comes with the plain meaning and, for most phrases, a number, such as how many people use it, hate it or look it up. The acronyms are the sneaky ones. EOD, EOW, COB and the British EOP all mean some version of “before you go home”, and none of them says whose home.

Job-ad phrases in the quiz

The job-ad questions are the ones worth getting right before an interview. “Fast-paced environment” means too much work for too few people, and “competitive salary” means the number comes later. “Self-starter” and “hit the ground running” often share an ad, and together they say nobody has time to train you.

Some words have drifted further. Remote can come with a city you have to live in, and hybrid can mean most of the week at a desk. “Team player” tends to show up in the memo asking for volunteers, the same week the extra pay for working holidays goes away. And “we’re a family here” is the ad line that wants your Saturday.

How you compare

Give the average UK worker 24 office phrases to explain and they’ll manage 7. Two right out of five already does better. Anything that beats you here, the corporate jargon dictionary puts into plain English.