What does “krillion” mean?
Updated
“Krillion” is a play on words, and once you see the two halves of it, the whole game makes more sense.
A made-up enormous number
English has a family of joke numbers: zillion, gazillion, bajillion, umpteen. Linguists call them indefinite hyperbolic numerals. They sound like million and billion but have no fixed value; they just mean “an absurdly large amount”. Krillion slots straight into that family.
The phrase the game is built on is “one in a krillion”, a twist on “one in a million”. Something that is one in a million is rare. Something that is one in a krillion is so rare it barely exists. That is exactly what the game asks you for: a correct answer so uncommon that almost nobody else thought of it.
And krill
The other half is krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that drift through the world’s oceans in vast swarms. Antarctic krill alone are thought to be one of the most abundant animal species on Earth by total mass. Krill are the classic example of “one among countless others”, which is what you are when you give the same answer as everyone else.
Why the ocean theme fits
The game turns your score into a dive. Common answers keep you in the shallows with the crowd. Rare answers take you down through the darker layers of the ocean. The sea is a neat metaphor for the long tail of answers: the surface is crowded and bright, the deep is quiet and full of strange things few people have seen.
Our own practice tiers lean into this with real ocean zones. The sunlit zone is the top layer of the sea where light reaches. The twilight zone sits below it, then the midnight zone, then the abyss. In our scoring guide you can see how each zone maps to points.
Krillion backwards
Fans have noticed that krillion spelled backwards is noillirk, and you will see that word floating around as a spin-off and in searches. It is a fun example of how a short, odd name gives a game a sticky identity.
Where to play
The official game is at krillion.io. This site is an unofficial fan site with unlimited practice dives, daily hints and guides like this one.