Tag Archives: Wordplay

We’re Number Pun! We’re Number Pun! — The ReHASHtag Game

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You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie or hashtag games on Twitter.

For years now, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was #PennyDellPuzzleSports. Today’s entries all mash up Penny Dell puzzles with teams, athletes, famous quotations, and more things associated with the world of sports!

Examples include: Seventh Inning Stretch Letters or Basketball For One.

(The entries leaned heavily towards baseball — understandably, since it only returned a few weeks ago.)

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

Puzzly Athletes!

CrackerJackie Robinson

Simone Biles Says

Tara Blipsinski

Wayne Grepsky

Puzzly Teams!

Arizona Diamond Ringbacks

MilwauKeyword Brewers

Minnesota Twin Crosswords

Philadelphia Fill-Innies

Tampa Bay Sunrays

Washington Wizard Words

Orlando Magic Squares

Chicago Bull’s-Eye Spiral

Puzzly Sports Terminology!

FenWord Ways Park

Doubleheader Trouble

A Few Fielder’s Choice Words

Box Scoremaster / Lucky Box Score

Perfect Dart Game / Perfect Fit Game

Right of Way field

End Zone of the Line

End of the Line drive

BaseLine ‘Em Up

Base Pathfinder

Baseball Diamond Mine

Grand Tour slam

Draw the Defensive Lineman

False Start and Finish

Game, Set, Match-up!

Hall of Framework

These Three-Pointers

Super Bowl Game

Scramble Across & Touchdown

Picker-Upper Deck Home Runs

Puzzly Famous Quotations!

“Are you ready for some Quotefalls?!”

“…The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Delete”

“I never said most of the Everything’s Relative I said.” – Yogi Berra

“This is like Deja vu All Four One again.” – Yogi Berra

“It ain’t Overlaps til it’s over.” -Yogi Berra

“Window Boxes isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” — Red Sanders

“…it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names… Well, let’s see, we have… Guess Who’s on first, What’s Left on second, You Know the Odds is on third…”

Several of our puzzlers went above and beyond, crafting calls from the announcers at these puzzly events!

The Call of the Game presented by Hall of Framework puzzle announcer Neil Simon Says:

“There’s two Drop-Outs here in the bottom of the Nine of Diamonds, One & Only one man on base, and Wade Mind Boggler steps up to the plate for the Tampa Bay Sunrays. This will be his First and Last at bat of the Word Games World Series. The Pitcher Sleuth looks to his What’s Left, then checks his Right Angles, sets his feet and Square Deals the pitch. It’s swung on by Mind Boggler and holy cow it’s a walk-off Home Run! That Baseball for One was crushed to Bits & Pieces! The Scoreboard says it all folks with a Three-to-One victory for the Sunrays. Who in the world could Picture This kind of ending? Just wow!”

Wide World of Sports reporting from the National Figure Skating competition:

Today, during the synchronized figure skating event, The Ice Chips team, sponsored by Penny Dell Puzzles, began their program divided up into Pairs and glided out onto the ice Two at a Time, and Step by Step taking their positions Face to Face. They gracefully began their number, first skating in a Mirror Image, then dividing up into Odds and Evens. A Small Change in the pace of the music brought a sequence of fast mohawks, turns, spread eagles, swizzles, lifts, and a Shuffle.

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Sports entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

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You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

A Handful of Puzzly Resources for Constructors!

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Crossword.

The internet has really grown the crossword community by leaps and bounds. Puzzlers can share favorite puzzles, reviews, opinions, and feedback with fellow solvers, constructors, editors, and publishers at the touch of a button. With downloadable puzzles, online solving, and puzzle apps (like Daily POP Crosswords!), access to puzzles has never been easier.

Entire forums dedicated to solving and sharing a love of puzzling are cultivating a new generation of solvers and encouraging ambitious new constructors. Twitter is a great place to start, there’s a growing community on r/crossword, and on Facebook, you’ve got both the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament group and the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory to keep you informed and aware of all things crossword.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that both solvers and constructors have greater access to resources than ever before. There are reviewers breaking down the crosswords printed by the major outlets on a daily basis, and blogs like Wordplay exploring how to construct and what words solvers and constructors should know. With searchable databases like XWordInfo out there as well, you can hunt down clues, entries, themes, and a huge chunk of the history of crosswords with ease.

But sadly, not all resources have made their way online, so building a personal library of key volumes to peruse and refer to can help boost your solving and constructing efforts.

So today, I thought I’d share a few of my personal favorite resources that I use when constructing not only crosswords, but all sorts of other puzzles, in the hopes that you find them useful as well.

Your mileage may vary, but to me, these books have been invaluable.

descriptionary

Descriptionary: A Thematic Dictionary (Fourth Edition) by Marc McCutcheon

Word Menu, in either book or online form, has long been the gold standard when it comes to building themed word lists that you can trust to be well-sourced and reliable. But when I need a theme idea, I have much greater luck flipping through the pages of the Descriptionary, a cross-cultural theme listing that covers everything from weather to fashion, medicine to crime.

Searchable by topic in the front and individual words in the index, it’s never difficult to find a list I’ve used before or to zero in on a topic as needed. I ended up buying my own copy after checking out the copy from my local library at least a half-dozen times, and I’ve never regretted it.

rhyming dictionary

The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary by Rosalind Fergusson

Whether I’m cluing, looking for rhymes to support a playful theme, or playing with pronunciation for a particular bit of wordplay, The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary is my go-to resource. It’s absolutely loaded with vocabulary, organized by individual rhyming syllables and patterns (as well as near-rhymes). Just look up your word to rhyme in the back index, and then go work.

cook's essential

The Cook’s Essential Kitchen Dictionary: A Complete Culinary Resource by Jacques Rolland

This book is a tremendous resource, running the gamut from food and equipment to cooking styles and common vernacular. Not only are these definitions informative, complete with preparation instructions and suggested dishes for given ingredients, but they add little touches of culinary history to the mix, offering context and greater detail.

The book also features subsections listing varieties of apples, cheese, salt, pasta shapes, and other ingredients. Whenever I need food-related clues or theme entries, this is my first stop.

dictionaries

I’m a sucker for weird words and colorful vocabulary, so I thoroughly enjoy constructing any unthemed puzzle that allows me to play with language. And there’s any number of niche dictionaries out there to bolster your puzzle lexicon and spruce up any word list.

Here’s a list of some of my favorites:

  • Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words by Josefa Heifetz Byrne
  • Murfles and Wink-a-peeps: Funny Old Words for Kids by Susan Kelz Sperling
  • The Endangered English Dictionary by David Grambs
  • The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk
  • Informal English: Puncture Ladies, Egg Harbors, Mississippi Marbles, and Other Curious Words and Phrases of North America by Jeffrey Kacirk
  • The Great Panjandrum (and 2,699 Other Rare, Useful, and Delightful Words and Expressions) by J.N. Hook
  • Stone the Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang by John Ayto and John Simpson
  • I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes
  • The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World by Adam Jacot de Boinod
  • That’s Amore!: The Language of Love for Lovers of Language by Erin McKean
  • Much Ado About English: Up and Down the Bizarre Byways of a Fascinating Language by Richard Watson Todd
  • America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America by David K. Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf
  • The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives for the Extraordinarily Literate by Eugene Ehrlich
  • Word Catcher: An Odyssey Into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words by Phil Cousineau

(And, although this book isn’t a dictionary, it includes some terrific vocabulary along the way, so it’s worth checking out: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea.)

Hopefully these resources can aid you in your puzzling endeavors as they’ve assisted me many times over. Are there any offline resources I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

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You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Let’s Play Crossword Bingo!

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Crossword.

If you solve enough crosswords, you’re bound to encounter some words more often than others.

Maybe the word has grid-friendly letters or a letter pattern that facilitates editing. Maybe it’s an otherwise obscure item that crosswords have kept in the zeitgeist.

Or maybe it’s a just three-letter word with vowels on either end, be it a female sheep, a tavern drink, a mine find, or fury, and that corner just won’t be completed without one of them.

Some solvers find fault with those words, the constructors who use them, or the outlets that publish puzzles featuring them. Other solvers, however, find fun ways to acknowledge their ubiquity.

For instance, a reddit user under the handle “atleasttheresmusic” created a bingo card based on words that crop up regularly in The New York Times crossword:

xwd bingo 1

Not only did they hit some classic examples of crosswordese, but they even managed to categorize their entries, highlighting crossword tropes like “short, poetic words” and the frequent use of abbreviations.

Between the bingo card itself and the many suggestions shared by fellow puzzlers in the comments, I couldn’t resist taking a crack at making a crossword bingo card of my own:

xwd bingo 2

As you can see, I’ve also organized the columns by category; from left to right, there’s abbreviations, names, vowel-heavy words, 3-letter entries, and non-U.S. terminology.

I couldn’t fit every entry I wanted to — EKE/IKE fell by the wayside, as did EWER — but I managed to jam a fair amount of crosswordese and personal pet peeves onto the card. Plus, given how often ALEE and ALOE appear, they’re basically a free space in the center of the card.

So how did I do, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? What words should I have included? Did the cleaner card created by “atleasttheresmusic” win out over mine, or did we both succeed in having some fun at the expense of crosswords?

And, most importantly, how quickly would you get BINGO if you used one of our cards? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

ACPT Cancelled (Again): More Crossword Tournament Updates!

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acptlogo

We can’t close out June without a bit more news, it seems.

Two weeks ago, we updated you on the state of the puzzle industry as it pertains to crossword tournaments. We were able to share the sad news that Lollapuzzoola would not be happening this year — a solve-at-home event is in the works — as well as the happier news that BosWords would be hosting an online tournament this year on Sunday afternoon, July 26.

We also made passing reference to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament‘s original date in March being cancelled, and a prospective date of the weekend of September 11-13 for a rescheduled tournament.

Unfortunately, yesterday Will Shortz confirmed through the NY Times Wordplay social media platforms that the 2020 ACPT has been scrapped for the year:

Over the past few months we kept modifying our plans for the event, as the pandemic persisted, but now it has become clear that it cannot be held this year at all.

We believe we have already refunded all registrations for the in-person tournament. If somehow we overlooked yours, please let us know (msmithacpt@gmail.com).

Registrations for at-home solving of the 2020 ACPT puzzles — either by mail or online — will be rolled over until next year. If you would like a refund instead, let us know that, too.

Originally, a weekend in late March was announced, but those posts were later replaced by updates stating that the tentative date for the 43rd ACPT is now the weekend of April 23-25, 2021.

Here’s hoping that the world will be in a better, healthier state and allow us to enjoy puzzling in public with our fellow puzzlers and cruciverbalists once again.

Something to look forward to.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Puns: What Sweet Music They Make

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Wordplay Wednesday 599

There’s nothing like a bit of shameless punnery to improve my mood. Sure, a deftly crafted and immaculately executed pun can be a delight, but there’s something about a labored, ridiculous pun that just brings me joy.

You know, like the one about going into surgery and being given two options: an old anesthetic or a paddle to the face.

It was an ether/oar situation.

BAM. Silly punnery afoot.

You can find it in many forms, like crossword clues and Tom Swifties. There’s even the O. Henry Pun-Off competition each year where punsmiths from all over the world gather to show off their linguistic limberness.

And what a treat it is when the puns are packaged in a song.

malinda 1

I recently stumbled across a wonderful example on YouTube when I found the channel belonging to singer, musician, and actress Malinda Kathleen Reese. Her channel, simply called MALINDA, has over 250,000 subscribers, and features not only her lovely voice and impressive musical chops, but a wide variety of creative endeavors involving music.

She’s crafted songs about subjects both joyful and sad, often incorporating submissions and suggestions from her viewers. One is made up entirely of old Facebook statuses she posted. Another features compliments she’s received online, while a third is composed from hate comments.

MalindaKathleenReese

Whether she’s singing what she sees, composing a symphony with a deck of cards, testing the reliability of the website RhymeZone by using it to write a rap, or performing with an orchestra of singers and musicians assembled for a virtual performance, Malinda is as ambitious as she is innovative.

And, as you might expect from this blog post’s introduction, she has a song made up entirely of shameless puns.

Enjoy, won’t you?

What a treat!

You can check out Malinda’s works on her YouTube page and stay up-to-date with her current projects on her Twitter account, and if you’re feeling so inclined, support her on Patreon so she can continue making marvelous musical melodies like the one above.

Thanks for brightening our days, Malinda!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Don’t Be a Square! Check Out These Puzzly Theme Park Ideas!

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Long-time readers know that we often host in-house wordplay contests. Not only do we invite our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles to participate, but our fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers as well!

This month, the challenge was to envision a Penny/Dell-inspired theme park!

Participants could create rides and attractions, provide slogans or ads, and whatever else came to mind for this imaginary puzzly paradise! Bonus points for any punny references to Penny/Dell puzzles or magazines!

With both text descriptions and art submitted, covering everything from individual rides to entire brochures, let’s check out what some clever puzzly minds came up with!

PENNYDELL PARK DIRECTORY

RIDES

BURIED TREASURE: Ahoy, mateys! Arrrrrr you ready for adventure? Do you have what it takes to locate the pirate’s booty? Come aboard your own private galleon on the BURIED TREASURE ride, me hearties!

TIME MACHINE: Crafted by Emmett “Doc” Brown himself, this DeLorean TIME MACHINE presents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit any time in the past or future. The opportunity to change history or view what is yet to come is all yours!
*Pennydell Park takes no responsibilty for any detrimental consequences that may occur due to your actions during your time-travel adventure.

TOP TO BOTTOM: In this thrill-seeking ride, you will ascend to the top of a tower that overlooks Pennydell Park. Enjoy a relaxing moment or two as you take in the scenery from above. Then, without warning, you will plummet to the bottom of the tower at frightening speeds. You will be taken from TOP TO BOTTOM again and again, resulting in either the excitement of a lifetime or the need for a family-sized package of motion sickness medication.

GAMES

A TO Z MAZE: Are you up to the challenge of this labyrinth of letters? In this game, you will enter a complicated maze in which each of the 26 letters of the alphabet are hidden. Upon finding each letter, you will receive a specially-marked token. Players who collect all 26 tokens win the a-maze-ing prize of a year’s supply of ALPHABET SOUP.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE: In this simple game of chance, players will spin the WHEEL OF FORTUNE to reveal what they’ve won. Prizes range from the terrific to the horrific. Will you walk away with a fist full of cash or a can full of trash? A tropical cruise or an old pair of shoes? Try your luck now!

FOOD AND DRINK

Don’t forget to stop by one of our famous snack stands for our delicious specialties! Now featuring ooey-gooey BROWNIE BITS AND PIECES, the classic popcorn treat CRACKERJACKS (with good prizes like they used to have!), and the ever-popular BANANA SPLIT PERSONALITIES – now with even more personalities than ever before!

puzzleopolis

UNAPPROVED ADVERTISEMENT

Welcome to Penny’s Easy & Fun  Variety Puzzles   Queasy & Fun Ride-It-Free Puzzles Theme Park!

Here you can enjoy some of our famous puzzly rides and games like:

  • Anagram Tragic Squares
  • Mine of Diamonds
  • Keep on Grooving
  • Cheat the Clock

Also, don’t forget to catch the Blinkwords 182 concert and enjoy a free slice of Domino’s “tastes good in Theory” pizza before you leave!

double trouble ride

WELCOME TO PUZZLYWOOD

With the postponement of this year’s Kentucky Derby, an exciting alternative would be to check out the Puzzle Derby at the newly opened Puzzlywood Theme Park, located at the Crossroads of Pigeonhole, which may be in Tennessee or Kentucky, nobody is really sure, but You Know the Odds.

Su and her husband Sum Doku created Puzzlywood Brick by Brick to celebrate their love for all things puzzly. As guests Zigzag into the main area of the park, known as the Circles in the Square, they are met by the Scoremaster who directs them to the Digital Display, where guests can select their Place Cards for the Puzzle in the Round or Pair Off for a little Double Trouble at the End of the Line.

Also at Right Angles from any of the Escalators, and in The Shadow of the Four Corners, solvers have the Right of Way on the Word Trails where they may come Face to Face with the Quote Calculator or the Number Sleuth, each of whom will offer a little Give and Take to help guests make Heads & Tails of the attractions under Camouflage. Decisions, Decisions, you will need a Strategy.

Puzzlywood also boasts a vibrant nightlife, as guests are continually Spellbound by the Throwbacks at the park Disco. For a quieter evening guests may enjoy the sweet bluegrass sounds emanating from the Fiddler’s Frame.

All Four One is the friendly motto of Puzzlywood where Three’s Company and the Letterboxes are always overflowing with Secret Messages penned by happy visitors, including many Guest Stars!

Did you come up with any puzzly theme park ideas, fellow puzzler? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!