Daily corporate jargon quiz

Nine office phrases come up, one at a time, each worth a step up the career ladder, from Intern to Chief executive. Each asks “What does this mean?” with four answers, lettered A to D. Only one is right.

Pick an answer and it locks in, then turns green or red. You have 15 seconds a question. A wrong answer, or running out of time, ends your climb.

Safe levels

Senior associate and Director are safe levels. Get past one, and a wrong answer drops you back to it with the points you had there. Miss before Senior associate and you leave with nothing.

Lifelines

You get three, and each works once a round. The clock keeps running while you use one.

• Ask HR takes away two wrong answers.
• Poll the team puts the team’s vote on each answer.
• Ping a coworker marks a coworker’s guess. They’re not always right.

Good to know

• The phrases get harder as you climb, and no phrase comes up twice in a round.
• In a Lightning round you get 8 seconds a question, and on Casual Friday 20.
• With the Take your time switch on, there’s no clock and no speed bonus, and the round can’t set your best.

A right answer pays more the faster you pick it.

The best possible score is 1,350, for all nine right at full speed.

Daily and solo rounds

Everyone who presses Play today’s round on the same date answers the same nine phrases. Play yesterday’s round replays the previous day’s nine for practice, with no pizza slices toward your job title and no best score.

Josh Wardle gave Wordle one puzzle a day. He said that made it feel scarce and kept play to about three minutes. LinkedIn built its first three puzzles the same way in May 2024. Each is one puzzle a day that takes a few minutes, with a streak to keep.

Here it’s nine phrases a day. Nobody gets an easier set, so you and the person at the next desk can compare scores fairly.

What goes into the nine

The quiz draws on 2,030 questions about 706 phrases. They range from meeting talk and acronyms to the corporate buzzwords people say they hate most.

In each question, the three wrong answers are guesses a new coworker might make, like “every other day” for EOD.

EOD, EOW, COB and the British EOP all mean some version of “before you go home”. None of them says whose home time, yours or the sender’s.

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.
• “Competitive salary” means the number comes later.
• When “self-starter” and “hit the ground running” turn up together, nobody has time to train you.
• “We’re a family here” means they’ll ask for your Saturday too.

How you compare

Give the average UK worker 24 office phrases to explain, and they’ll manage 7. That’s under a third.

If you missed a few, the corporate jargon dictionary puts most of the quiz phrases into plain English.