Tag Archives: Puzzle to solve

It’s Follow-Up Friday: For the Wynne edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of Arthur Wynne.

[Image courtesy of express.co.uk.]

In 1913, Arthur Wynne created the first modern crossword puzzle — which he called a Word-Cross puzzle — and over a hundred years later, we are still enjoying the ever-increasing variety of puzzles and clues spawned by that “fun”-filled grid. (Click here for more details on that groundbreaking puzzle.)

Wynne was born on June 22, 1871 in Liverpool, England, but moved to the states in the early 1890s, spending time in Pittsburgh and New York City before creating his Word-Cross puzzle for the New York World. (We can also credit Wynne with the use of symmetrical black squares in crossword grids.)

So, in honor of Mr. Wynne’s 144th birthday, I’ve got a little word creation puzzle for you! How many words of four or more letters can you make from the letters in ARTHUR WYNNE’s name?

I came up with 110! Can you match or top my wordcount? Let me know!

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The Perils of Puzzling: Alternate solutions!

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[Thinking hard. Image courtesy of popsci.com]

The science, fantasy, and science fiction website io9 has a marvelous weekly feature run by Robbie Gonzalez, wherein they tackle brain teasers and riddles both new and old. I’ve explored several of them here on PuzzleNation Blog, most notably the 100 Men in Hats puzzle, which expanded on the Men in Hats puzzle concept from one of our earliest posts.

But one of their latest riddles provided a valuable example of how crucial test-solving and crowd-sourcing can be to a puzzle’s success.

The idea was simple enough: look at the numbers below, and determine what number should take the place of the question mark. The only guideline? The answer was NOT six.

I posted this riddle on our Facebook page on Monday and shared it with fellow editors at the PuzzleNation office, and got all sorts of answers in return.

One solver came up with 5 as the answer, positing that the vertical numbers formed fractions. So, with 1/2 and then 3/4 as the next number, the pattern would be adding 1/4. Adding 1/4 to 3/4 equals 1, and 5/5 equals 1.

There were other solutions that also yielded 5 as an answer, like doing what my friend called a zigzag equation, adding 1 from the top to 4 from the bottom to get 5 on the top as the answer, and then reversing it by adding 2 from the bottom to 3 from the top, getting 5 on the bottom as the missing answer.

A second solver came up with 3 as the answer, adding the top row to equal 9, and then trying to do the same with the bottom row.

Another solver saw them as two separate patterns, where going from 1 to 3 involved adding 2 and going from 2 to 4 involved multiplying by two. Therefore, by this method, the answer is 8. (Yet another solver did the same, except they squared the numbers along the bottom row, leading to 16 as the answer.)

As you can see, there were all sorts of mathematical solutions. When you’re told to ignore the most obvious solution, your mind can create some truly innovative ways of reimagining the information available.

[A head full of numbers. Image courtesy of equip.org]

Several solvers thought outside the box and came up with R, relating the numbers by their positions on a gearshift knob instead of mathematically.

As it turns out, this was the solution the puzzle’s creator initially intended, only realizing later that the puzzle had many possible solutions.

In his own words: The riddle was too open-ended. Whether you interpreted it as a mathematical puzzle, or an automotive design puzzle, it was poorly posed, and that’s on me. Puzzle-posing is an art in and of itself, and it’s easy to mess up. For a solution to be satisfying, the person posing the puzzle needs to provide enough information that the puzzle is unambiguously solvable, but not so much that it gives too much away.

[A proposed layout that points more directly toward the creator’s intended solution.]

Now, as a puzzler myself, I can absolutely empathize with Mr. Gonzalez here. There are plenty of times I’ve created a puzzle or a brain teaser and assumed that everyone would follow the same path I envisioned, considering the solution if not obvious, then at least reproduceable.

But solvers can always surprise you by finding alternate routes to the answer or utilizing a different way of thinking that ends with a second, but still valid solution.

So after a few stumbles and missteps of my own in the past that were similar to the one in today’s puzzle, I now make sure to have another set of eyes on my brain teasers, either during the creation process or as a test-solver afterward.

A second set of eyes can be absolutely invaluable in helping you spot possible alternate solutions.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Letter rip! It’s lipogram time!

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[Building words and phrases, one letter at a time.]

This week I did something a little different in the preview for today’s blog. Usually on Mondays, I post a brief preview of the week’s blog posts, Facebook and Twitter content, et cetera.

But instead of a short teaser about the entry, I posted the following clue:

How quickly can you find out what is unusual about this paragraph? It looks so ordinary that you would think that nothing was wrong with it at all and, in fact, nothing is. But it is unusual. Why? If you study it and think about it you may find out, but I am not going to assist you in any way. You must do it without coaching. No doubt, if you work at it for long, it will dawn on you. Who knows? Go to work and try your skill. Par is about half an hour.

Did you figure out what’s curious about it? It’s missing the letter E!

[A keyboard displaying the most commonly used letters in the language in delightful bar-graph form. It should come as no surprise which letter appears most frequently.]

That paragraph is a terrific example of a lipogram, a written work that purposely avoids or leaves out a given letter. Lipograms are part writing challenge and part puzzle, taxing your vocabulary and your creativity.

(Removing any letter can make things tougher. I remember when my friend’s L key on his keyboard stopped working. “I think it will do well” became “I think it wi do we” until he started using the 1 key as a substitute L.)

And if you think writing a paragraph without the letter E is tough, imagine writing an entire novel without it. Ernest Vincent Wright did just that in 1939 with his 50,000 word novel Gadsby. He even went so far as to rephrase famous lines by William Congreve and John Keats in order to keep the letter E away.

Gadsby partially inspired a French author named Georges Perec to do the same, and his novel La Disparition (also known as A Void) doesn’t feature a single E over the course of three hundred pages.

There are numerous other lipogrammatic works and puzzles, but I think my favorite is the novel Ella Minnow Pea by author Mark Dunn.

Not only is the novel told through letters or notes shared by several characters, but the narrative grows increasingly lipogrammatic as the story progresses.

Check out this summary from Wikipedia:

The novel is set on the fictitious island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, which is home to Nevin Nollop, the supposed creator of the well-known pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This sentence is preserved on a memorial statue to its creator on the island and is taken very seriously by the government of the island.

Throughout the book, tiles containing the letters fall from the inscription beneath the statue, and as each one does, the island’s government bans the contained letter’s use from written or spoken communication. A penalty system is enforced for using the forbidden characters, with public censure for a first offense, lashing or stocks (violator’s choice) upon a second offense and banishment from the island nation upon the third.

So as the book progresses, fewer and fewer letters are used! It’s both an impressive linguistic feat and a wonderful work of totalitarian satire. (And how can you not love a character’s name sounding like LMNOP?)

[In a Christmas episode of the ’90s cartoon Animaniacs, Wakko keeps spelling Santa “Santla,” inspiring a rousing, punny version of “Noel” to correct Wakko’s spelling.]

Our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles have a lipogram puzzle: Dittos. In Dittos, you’re given a series of letters, and then told to spell five common words using those letters AND a given letter. You can repeat the given letter as many times as necessary.

For example, if you were given the letters AAENRY and then told to make 2 five-letter words, using D as many times as necessary, you might come up with DREAD and DANDY.

But what about the flip side? What if you decided you were only going to use one vowel? Well then, my ambitious friend, you’ve accepted the challenge of creating a univocalic.

I’m not familiar with any longer works that are univocalic. You usually see them in paragraph form or, occasionally, palindrome form. “A man, a plan, a canal… Panama!” is probably the most famous univocalic in history.

(Univocalics are not to be confused with supervocalics, which are words that include all five vowels, like sequoia or abstemious.)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at a curious subset of puzzles and wordplay. One of my fellow puzzlers suggested I pursue lipograms as a follow-up to my post a little while back about single-letter puzzles, and I couldn’t resist.

Have you ever tried to write a lipogram or univocalic, PuzzleNationers? Let me know! I’d love to see them!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

A “Tolkien” Bit of Puzzly Wordplay

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[A simple rebus, courtesy of mentalfloss.com.]

We’ve explored lots of puzzles in the time I’ve been writing for PuzzleNation Blog. Sudoku, crosswords, riddles, logic problems, anagrams, brain teasers, all sorts of coded puzzles and cryptograms… the list is seemingly endless.

But in all that time, we haven’t really covered one of the most accessible, visual puzzles still popular today: the rebus.

In a rebus puzzle, pictures (often with single letters added or subtracted) represent words and phrases, spelling out a message hidden in plain sight.

For instance, in the above rebus, you have an urn, a nest, then a hem, some ink, and someone being weighed. Put it all together, and you get… Ernest Hemingway.

Anyone who watched the game show Concentration or the later edition Classic Concentration probably remembers the rebus puzzles that featured prominently in the show.

As the players randomly chose numbered tiles two at a time, they revealed various prizes beneath the tiles. If they managed to find a match — uncovering the same prize with both guesses on a given turn — they banked that prize. Those tiles then went away, revealing part of the rebus beneath. If a player solved the rebus, he or she won all of the prizes they matched earlier.

Although rebuses tend to be simpler than most other puzzles, the difficulty can depend on the cleverness of the puzzler creating it. After all, the celebrated author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, was known to create rebus letters in his youth and send them to family members and friends.

Can you unravel this message from the future creator of Middle-Earth?

If you’re stuck, I can break down the first line for you. You have the number 1000, an eye, a deer, several Y’s, an owl, the country of France with “Fr.” written on it, and a snake hissing.

1000 equals M in Roman numerals, so paired with the eye, you have “my.” Y’s is a soundalike for “wise.” The rest are pretty clear. So put them all together and you have “My dear wise owl Fr. Francis.” Tolkien was pretty clever even back then!

Unfortunately, this is only the front page of the rebus, so the solved message is incomplete. To see the back page, you need to look up the original letter in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. (And, sadly, the PuzzleNation Blog travel budget only covers trips to the diner and back.)

But, if you’d like to check out another Tolkien rebus puzzle, one written when he was 11 years old, click here!

As visual wordplay and puzzling in one of its purest forms, the rebus has been around for centuries, and with the advent of emojis in texting, I doubt they’re going away anytime soon.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

One Letter Makes All the Difference

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I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the power of words, and rightly so. Words are the foundation of civilization. They’re how we communicate, how we express ourselves, how we interpret and process and quantify the world around us.

And playing with them is a cornerstone of entertainment. Jokes and puns depend on wordplay, as do riddles, brain teasers, and so many puzzles. Whether they’re being crossed, anagrammed, or shared with friends on an online Scrabble board, words are puzzle power.

That’s true even of letters. A single letter can not only speak volumes, it can be the key to unlocking an entire puzzle.

For instance, let’s talk crosswords. Knowing one across entry is a plural often allows you to place an S, giving you an anchor for the down entry that crosses it.

Cryptograms often offer a single letter as a hook to get you started. In addition, anytime you see a lone letter in a quote, you know it’s an I or an A.

Numerous anagram puzzles involve adding a single letter to a word, anagramming the result, and getting something new and unexpected.

That sort of letter addition reminds me of a brain teaser:

There’s a word in the English language in which the first 2 letters signify a male, the first 3 signify a female, the first 4 signify a great man, and the whole word signifies a great woman. What is that word?

In all of these examples, single letters are part of a greater puzzle. But what about puzzles composed entirely of single letters?

Easy. I can think of two.

In the first, single letters are the first letters of words forming some sort of pattern. Can you deduce the pattern AND provide the next entry in the series?

  • O, T, T, F, F, S, S, E, ?
  • J, F, M, A, M, J, J, A, S, O, N, ?
  • S, M, H, D, W, M, ?
  • M, V, E, M, J, S, U, ?
  • D, K, P, C, O, F, G, ?

In the second, the single letters are still the first letters of words, but we’ve added numbers and it’s up to you to deduce what the letters represent.

  • 3 F in a Y
  • 366 D in a LY
  • 12 S in the Z
  • 4 Q in a D
  • 13 C in a S

All of this, sprung from a single letter. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? No wonder we can accomplish so much with words, given building blocks like these.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Mother’s Day Answers edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’ll be posting the answers to our Mother’s Day Unscramblers puzzle!

On Sunday, in honor of the many puzzle-loving moms in the audience, I created a twofold challenge. First, you had to unscramble the names of 12 famous sitcom mothers, and then you had to match them with their respective TV shows.

So, without further ado and hullabaloo, here are the answers!

1. Marion Cunningham — H. Happy Days
2. Samantha Stephens — D. Bewitched
3. Morticia Addams — B. The Addams Family
4. Jill Taylor — L. Home Improvement
5. Peggy Bundy — G. Married… With Children
6. Sophia Petrillo — K. The Golden Girls
7. Claire Dunphy — J. Modern Family
8. Florida Evans — E. Good Times
9. Maggie Seaver — F. Growing Pains
10. Thelma Harper — A. Mama’s Family
11. Harriette Winslow — I. Family Matters
12. Jane Jetson — C. The Jetsons

How did you do? Are you a Mother’s Day puzzle master, or did you sitcom this one out?

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!