Baloney is a free daily lie-detection game. Each of ten rounds shows three short statements on one topic — exactly one is a plausible fabrication. You tap the fake before the timer, then every statement is revealed as true or false with a one-line truth, and you earn a shareable Baloney Detector verdict from 'Believes Everything' to 'Baloney Immune'. No account, no sign-up.

How do you play Baloney?

Open the site, read the three statements in each round, and tap the one you think is fabricated before the ~30-second timer runs out. After each round the fake is revealed along with the truth of all three statements, plus what percent of today's players got fooled. You win by smell, not recall — no trivia knowledge required.

Yes. Baloney is completely free and ad-supported, with no account, no sign-up, and nothing to install. A new set of ten rounds is released every day and is the same for everyone that day; your streak is saved in your browser.

Case File #0058

Aug 18, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

Round 1 LANGUAGE
- ✓ TRUE
  The everyday word 'goodbye' began as a contraction of the parting phrase 'God be with ye'.
  TRUE. Repeated shortening of 'God be with ye' produced 'godbwye' and eventually 'goodbye'.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  The word 'taxi' comes from the Greek word 'taxidi', meaning 'journey', chosen because the vehicles carried travellers from place to place.
  FALSE. 'Taxi' is short for 'taximeter cab'; the taximeter is named from a fare-charge root plus Greek 'metron' (measure), not from 'taxidi'.
- ✓ TRUE
  The word 'sandwich' comes from the title of an 18th-century English earl, associated with the habit of eating meat between slices of bread.
  TRUE. The food is named after the Earl of Sandwich, a title dating to the 1600s.
Round 2 NATURE
- ✓ TRUE
  The Himalayas are still slowly rising because the Indian plate keeps pushing northward into the rest of Asia.
  TRUE — the ongoing collision continues to crumple and lift the range by millimeters each year.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  The summit of Mount Everest is dark volcanic rock, formed back when the mountain was an active volcano.
  FALSE — Everest was never a volcano; its summit is marine limestone, packed with fossils of creatures from an ancient sea floor.
- ✓ TRUE
  Rock near Everest's summit contains the fossils of sea creatures that once lived on an ancient ocean floor.
  TRUE — the collision that raised the range lifted old seabed limestone, fossils and all, to the top of the world.
Round 3 SPACE
- ✓ TRUE
  A neutron star can cram more mass than the entire Sun into a sphere only about 20 kilometers wide.
  TRUE. These collapsed stellar cores are among the densest objects in the universe.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about as much as a car does here on Earth.
  FALSE. A teaspoon would weigh billions of tonnes, not a car's worth — neutron star matter is almost unimaginably dense.
- ✓ TRUE
  Some neutron stars, called pulsars, spin hundreds of times per second while sweeping beams of radiation like a lighthouse.
  TRUE. Their beams flash past our line of sight so regularly they were once mistaken for alien signals.
Round 4 SCIENCE
- ✓ TRUE
  The Eiffel Tower can stand about 15 centimeters taller in summer, because its iron expands as it heats up.
  TRUE. Metals expand when warmed, so the tower literally grows a bit in the summer sun.
- ✓ TRUE
  Under certain conditions, hot water can freeze faster than cold water, an effect named after Erasto Mpemba.
  TRUE. This counterintuitive Mpemba effect has been observed, though the exact reasons are still debated.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  Metal feels colder than wood in the same room because metal naturally sits a few degrees below room temperature.
  FALSE. Both are at the same temperature; metal only feels colder because it pulls heat from your hand much faster.
Round 5 ANIMALS
- ✓ TRUE
  A dolphin sleeps with one half of its brain at a time, keeping one eye open and surfacing to breathe.
  TRUE. This 'unihemispheric' sleep lets it rest while staying alert enough to surface for air.
- ✓ TRUE
  Dolphins use signature whistles that act like individual names, identifying themselves and calling to specific others.
  TRUE. Each dolphin develops a personal whistle others use to address it.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  Dolphins are fish and breathe underwater through gills, like other marine animals.
  FALSE. Dolphins are air-breathing mammals that must surface to breathe through a blowhole, not gills.
Round 6 LANGUAGE
- ✗ FABRICATION
  The use of 'bug' for a computer fault began entirely with a real moth found jamming a machine in 1947, the first time the word ever meant a technical fault.
  FALSE. The 1947 moth was a fun real incident, but 'bug' for a technical defect was already in use decades earlier, so it was not the first such use.
- ✓ TRUE
  The word 'spam', for unwanted bulk messages, is widely traced to a Monty Python sketch built around the canned meat of the same name.
  TRUE. The sketch's endless repetition of 'spam' inspired the term for flooding inboxes with repetitive junk.
- ✓ TRUE
  The word 'byte' was spelled deliberately with a 'y' to keep it from being confused with the smaller unit 'bit' in writing.
  TRUE. The respelling avoided accidental clipping to 'bit' and gave the eight-bit unit a distinct look.
Round 7 NATURE
- ✗ FABRICATION
  A tree's age can be read from its rings, and the rings on the shaded north side are always spaced about twice as wide as those on the south.
  FALSE — ring width tracks each year's growing conditions, not a fixed compass ratio; there's no reliable 2-to-1 north-south rule.
- ✓ TRUE
  Trees can trade nutrients and pass warning signals to one another through underground fungal networks linking their roots.
  TRUE — symbiotic fungi form networks that shuttle carbon, nutrients, and stress signals between connected trees.
- ✓ TRUE
  The oldest known individual trees, bristlecone pines, have lived for more than 4,000 years.
  TRUE — some Great Basin bristlecone pines are over 4,800 years old, among the oldest living non-clonal organisms.
Round 8 NATURE
- ✓ TRUE
  Glaciers hold most of the world's fresh water, far more than all the rivers and lakes combined.
  TRUE. Ice sheets and glaciers lock up the majority of Earth's fresh water.
- ✓ TRUE
  Glaciers are slow rivers of ice that flow downhill under their own weight, carving and reshaping valleys as they move.
  TRUE. Despite looking solid, glacial ice deforms and creeps downhill over years.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  A glacier is a solid, motionless sheet of ice that never moves or changes within a human lifetime.
  FALSE. Glaciers flow continuously, and many advance or retreat measurably within years.
Round 9 GEOGRAPHY
- ✓ TRUE
  The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, covering an area roughly comparable to the United States.
  TRUE. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, about the size of the continental US.
- ✗ FABRICATION
  The Sahara is the single largest desert on Earth, larger even than the continent of Antarctica.
  FALSE. Antarctica is actually the largest desert on Earth; the Sahara is only the largest hot one.
- ✓ TRUE
  Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives extremely little precipitation.
  TRUE. Despite the ice, Antarctica's very low precipitation makes it a desert by definition.
Round 10 LANGUAGE
- ✗ FABRICATION
  The word 'sincere' comes from the Latin 'sine cera', meaning 'without wax', from honest sculptors who refused to hide cracks in marble with wax filler.
  FALSE. 'Sincere' comes from Latin 'sincerus' (clean, pure, whole); the charming 'without wax' sculptor story is a well-known folk etymology with no support.
- ✓ TRUE
  The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin 'salarium', a term connected to salt and to allowances paid to Roman soldiers.
  TRUE. Salarium linked to 'sal' (salt); the Romans tied pay to this word, which is where 'worth your salt' feeling comes from.
- ✓ TRUE
  The word 'ketchup' most likely traces back through Malay to a Hokkien Chinese term for a fermented fish or seafood sauce.
  TRUE. The original sauce was nothing like the tomato version; the fish-sauce ancestor travelled via Southeast Asian trade into English.

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