Huge Scribblenauts dictionary leaked

By Robert Purchese Published 14 September, 2009

DS game recognises over 22,000 words.

The entire list of words that DS game Scribblenauts recognises has been published on the internet, comprised of a whopping 22,802 entries.

You can read all of those on Crunchgear, although doing so will ruin the surprise.

Scribblenauts is based around solving puzzles by summoning - writing - things or people to help. Jesus might know how to defeat a monster, for example, or you could use Alpha-Chloroacetophenone.

As such, Scribblenauts is one of the most anticipated games of the year.

And while 22,802 may sound feeble and finite next to the near one-million words of the English language, in list form it is bewildering.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (29) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • BabyJesus #1 2 years ago

    I'm actually considering buying a DS for mainly this and few other games.

    Looks like an incredible game.

    Kudos to the developers, for going away from the norm.

  • mingster #2 2 years ago

    They should license the technology behind this game out to other developers that make adventure games.

  • erp #3 2 years ago

    Gamers ruining it for themselves since, oooooooooooooh, forever.

  • penhalion #4 2 years ago

    @erp

    How is this list ruining it for anyone. I don't recall anyone holding a gun to gamers heads and forcing them to read 22k words! Hell who would bother anyway.

    I've played the game and aside from the dictionary, it's not really that much fun after a few dozen levels. You may be able to create loads of objects but, they don't do what you expect them to. For instance a vampire can somehow bite god and turn him into a zombie?!?

    The novelty of this game is purely to do with the preception that you can somehow do millions of things with it. Reality is that for all the objects in the game, there are actually only a few actual interactions you can perform with them.
    Edited by 1 at 14/09/09 @ 10:05

  • Xerx3s #5 2 years ago

    Leaked? Probably more like "released as PR stunt".

  • Meho #6 2 years ago

    My impressions are different to penhalion's though. Yes, there are a lot of obvious ways to solving puzzles, however the real genius of the game is the freedom it gives you to experiment. It actually gives you incentives to solve every problem in at least four different ways and it has nevertheles inspired me to go back and solve some of them more times than that.

    And also, even outside the puzzles, there is a kind of a sandbox mechanic at play here, forcing you to experimetn and build events just to see what happens.

  • mingster #7 2 years ago

    at penhalion the fact the you can conjure god and a vampire and the game knows that a vampire can even bite god in the first place is an impressive programming achievement.

  • udat #8 2 years ago

    That god-biting zombification thing makes me want to buy this now.

  • Shinetop #9 2 years ago

    Why is there always some smartass who has to comment on a leak with "Oh it's just a PR stunt."? As if nothing can actually ever leak?

  • Slo_Mo #10 2 years ago

    LOL BabyJesus, there is one born every minute.

    Scribblenauts 2009's MOTY Meh Of The Year.

  • Fab4 #11 2 years ago

    20,000-25,000 words is the commonly quoted size of vocabulary of a college graduate.

  • Shadders #12 2 years ago

    @Fab4

    How would anyone ever go about measuring such a thing? Sounds like crap-stats to me.

    This isn't an attack at you or anything, I'm sure that's something you've read and is probably taught on sociology courses or whatever, but it still sounds like a very speculative guess that someone has made.

  • shotgun44 #13 2 years ago

    I know 25,001 words. But I did go to university.

  • redneon Verified Programmer, SUMO Digital #14 2 years ago

    I know 16 words. By some bizarre (and useful) coincidence they form the entirety of this post.

  • grussbarbar #15 2 years ago

    Hm. It's a bit useless to compare the number to the nearly 1 million words in the English language. About half a million of those reportedly are scientific terms and I'd imagine only a relatively small part of the other half million is made up of concrete nouns.

    If Scribblenauts recognizes that many words/concrete nouns, and attaches (somewhat) different gameplay to each of them, I'm very impressed.

  • Daryoon #16 2 years ago

    It's just a shame those 20,000 words translate to around 20 objects :( The game's quite disappointing, selling itself on 5 seconds of fun. Most of the items don't even do what you'd expect. See that dirt? Think you can summon a digger to excavate it? Sorry, the digger is just a re-sprite of the car and doesn't actually DIG. Same with the tank, which doesn't shoot anything. God is just a person sprite, as is Rick Astley. They're no different to the Viking or the Pirate.

    On paper it sounds awesome. In reality, it's like all these big idea games - inevitably limited.

  • spimmy #17 2 years ago

    its missing doomsday machine

  • Fab4 #18 2 years ago

    Measuring a typical vocabulary is an inexact science (if its even a science) and there are many different figures bandied about, however 20,000-25,000 is one i've seen quite a bit. I've also seen one ranging from 38,000 - 65,000 based on a random selection of texts, amassing to 1 million words in total. I'd still say over 22,000 is a decent total for a game.

  • mexalen #19 2 years ago

    @redneon: 20K words of praise to you for that post!

  • JahB #20 2 years ago

    how come daryoon gets rated down for pointing out the obvious?

    yes, there are 22k words in the game. no, they don't do 22k different things. i've played and really enjoyed this for about 5 minutes, but then you realize it's just thousands of different sprites for a few variables.

  • penhalion #21 2 years ago

    I only played the demo for this game at a few shows. The vampire and god example is totally generic. You can do Vampire and man, vampire and mage etc. etc and the results are 100% the same i.e. the vampire turns the good guy into a zombie.

    I played through 5 stages I think and I managed to use a rope for pretty much every one. I'm sure this will be a great seller but, from what I played, it's simply not very interesting after a very short time.

  • mingster #22 2 years ago

    Odd coz when i had to drill through a wall a pickaxe did the job.
    Would you try digging through a wall with a drill or a shovel in real life? No. You chose the wrong tools.
    Digging through the ground a spade worked.
    You did most levels with a rope? Yup tried that and found a lasso or grappling hook worked better.
    The fact you can use all of the above or a net or a fishing rod or a chain or a ufo with grapple beam
    all to do the same thing is pretty cool.

  • Meho #23 2 years ago

    All of that rope talk misses the point: when you do the problem once, you unlock challenge mode where yu are asked to solve the same problem three times, without repeating any of the summoned objects.

  • el_pollo_diablo #24 2 years ago

    I will be buying this just to try out "Hadron Collider"

    :D

  • smelly #25 2 years ago

    how did hackers "leak" this when the game isnt out yet?

    I see "pirate" is on the list.

  • UncleLou #26 2 years ago

    Odd coz when i had to drill through a wall a pickaxe did the job.
    Would you try digging through a wall with a drill or a shovel in real life? No. You chose the wrong tools.

    So it does work, and the game is now getting a bad reputation from pirates who have no clue how to play it and tried it for all but 5 minutes. Great. Mabye it's balanced by the pirates who do have a clue though. :p
    Edited by 2 at 14/09/09 @ 19:51

  • smelly #27 2 years ago

    Well you dont expect a pirate to be smart do you? Afterall, they're poor people who still live with their moms and cant even afford a 20 quid game.

    Probably flip burgers at mcdonalds.

  • smelly #28 2 years ago

    >And I say that as someone who's still regularly playing Dwarf Fortress.

    And as a pirating scumbag who probably has a small penis?

  • UncleLou #29 2 years ago

    No, it is getting a bad reputation because it is really kind of meh after the first moments of enjoyment

    Yeah, I've figured that's what the people say who think the game doesn't work. Like Daryoon. No contradiction to my post yet. So, is he right or not? That's a serious question, I haven't played it, but mingster's post sounds entirely different, and I can't quite imagine I can summon a frog instead of a beaver and they will both gnaw through a tree (or rather, neither will, according to Daryoon's post).

  • OrgasmicMutton #30 2 years ago

    This game is sorely tempting me to buy a DS (plus I can buy all those puzzle games that EG has reviewed so highly over the last few years).

    The fact that alpha-chloroacetephenone can be used warms the cockles of my geeky heart (it's a component of tear gas, in case you didn't know)! Who puts that much attention of detail into a game? Genius.