We date when English started using the word · not when someone first wrote it down, and not how old its ancestors are. Almost every English word can be chased back to Latin, Greek or further; if that counted, every card would be six thousand years old.

Cheese and justice show what that means · both come from Latin. But cheese was borrowed into Germanic before English existed, so it reached Britain already inside the language — English never borrowed it, English inherited it. Justice is Roman law and a Roman goddess, older as a word than cheese, but English said rihtwisnes and dom until the Normans brought their courts. Seven hundred years apart in English, same source language.

The reveal tells you both · when English took the word, and where the word had been before that.

Move a word · drag it up or down the list. Or tap one word and then another, and they trade places.

Most cards are five words; some are six. A sixth word does not change any rule — it just means six times as many ways to get it wrong.

Five tries · check your order and anything already in the right place turns green. It stays green while you leave it there, and you can still move it if you think the check was luck.

You also get how close you are · out of the ten pairings of five words, how many have the older one above the younger. Get the whole run right but shifted by one and nothing is in the right place, yet six of the ten pairs are — so the pair count is the honest measure of near.

The gaps are real · no two words on a card are close enough together for the order to be arguable. If two words look like a coin flip, one of them is older than you think.