It’s more like puzzles meet the lottery. A kid gets a random word, the definition, alternate pronunciations, etymology of the word, and then they hear it in a sentence.
The contestant may know the word, may not, but usually has enough information to work it out about half the time. In the second to last round, the other girl was one letter off (my guess was the same as hers), using o instead of e since the O is common in words that come from Greek.
I got the winner’s word correct based on etymology also. I don’t think she knew the word, but it was Spanish/Portuguese in origin which is very phonetic and was able to work it out.
In Russia, I'm given to understand that radio hosts will have contests on the grammatically correct pronunciation of very large numbers. Because of the gender and six different grammatical cases of the language, large numbers can be difficult to say correctly.
Perhaps a Russian speaker can comment on this.