posttraumatic. At least, it’s one word in the American Heritage Dictionary, no hyphen. Was this what you had in mind?
I actually got out of bed to post this (and I was just dropping off to sleep when it occurred to me). Not that I’m obsessed with word puzzles or anything.
That it was. I wish more people would post 'em so I could guess instead of just offering them up.
Here goes . . .
NEOCL
ISESTA
Punha - neoclassical
Ren - no. If you’ll read my clue again, it’s an object, not a verb form. Keep trying.
Punha, gonna make me type this one out?
antidisestablishmentarianism.
One more to ren for posttraumatic. Only one more, YZG. The updated standings (unless I made a mistake) are:
mattk: 8
The Man Who: 4
ren: 3
The Voice of Reason: 2
Fretful Porpentine: 1
Olentzero: 1
scratch1300: 1
matt_mcl: 1
I’m working on another list that I may be able to put up in a day or two. If nobody gets YZG before then, I’ll put the answer on my web page and post a link to it.
WLYW doesn’t seem all that easy to me. The best I can come up with is crawlyworm. It’s not a word but it ought to be.
Oddly enough, I thought WLYW was one of the easiest I’ve seen here – so maybe I think like ren. Either that, or I’m at the age when many of my friends are marrying and I see all those NEWLYWEDS running around.
All I can come up with for now are –
HROD
YNCR
MICO
ITFI
pushrod
Great topic here - good enough to get me to delurk for a while, at least. Wish I had seen this sooner, though.
panamajack - Is that last one spitfire?
The third one fits Necronomicon, but that’s probably not what you were going for, hmm?
Here are some more to think about; they probably shouldn’t be too hard (though I can’t really judge difficulty), but I think they’re unique.
KYLI
GMAT
XONO
AKFA
pITFIre
micobyte, I think . . or maybe micobite?
ScHRODinger . . . but that’s not what you were looking for.
sYNCRosis (I think?)
KYLI =sKYLIght
GMAT =praGMATism
XONO =thought maybe exonorate, but that’s a misspelling. Why couldn’t you have made it Xeno?
AKFA =AkfAFKA (a cousin of Alfalfa).
My own humble offering:
WFL
taxonomy
breakfast
Those who know me are greatly disturbed at the possibility that someone else thinks like me. Newlyweds was the word I was thinking of.
Seems like a lot of these puzzles work that way, though. Sometimes you just get it right away and then it seems easy. I spotted the ones above, plus about a third of bibliophage’s original list off the bat. The rest seemed harder.
Strange letter combinations seem to occur most commonly at the breaks in compound words or at pre- or suffixes. I especially liked dachshund because it’s counterintuitive, being a foreign-derived word.
YNCR-syncretic
MICO-semiconductor, semicolon, semiconscious
KYLI-alkylic
GMAT- dogmatic, phlegmatic
I have my second list of twenty. In order not to give the first person who sees it an unfair advantage, I’ll post five at a time over the next couple of days. Unlike the last time, all the words occur unhyphenated in both dictionaries (American Heritage and New Shorter Oxford). All the words are fairly common, but several of the sequences occur in less common words as well. Points are awarded for these uncommon words only if the common one hasn’t been guessed first. If points are awarded for an uncommon word, the common one will still earn you points. [ol][li]AWBE[/li][li]CDO[/li][li]CKSK[/li][li]EGEE[/li][li]EINAC[/ol][/li]I’ll give the answer to YZG tomorrow afternoon if no one gets it before then.
EWR- For some strange reason I came up with braillewriter first. When I looked it up, I saw that it is a machine similar to a typewriter. Duh.
CDO-Anecdote
egee-exegee
awbe-strawberry
EINAC continues to plague me with ENIAC.
CKSK-trickskit?
squeegee? more common one?
Wow, that was quick. Quite impressive.
skylight - punha (I really like how that letter sequence looks)
pragmatic, phlegmatic, dogmatic - punha, bibliophage (Oops, far too common - I was actually thinking of enigmatic)
taxonomy - ren
breakfast - ren
CKSK - thickskinned? Or is that hyphenated?
EGEE - protegee? I don’t know if I even spelled that correctly. (I haven’t got any [non-electronic] dictionaries to check in.)
CKSK could also be buckskin. Probably a few other -skin endings…
CKSK - are thickskinned or thickskulled passable?
On the ones I had, spITFIre and seMICOlon (or the others – obscurely, chemico- is occasionally seen as a prefix, so it would work too)
YNCR - syncretic is one I thought of, but there’s actually a slightly more common one as well.
HROD - I’ve seen that push rod can be written as pushrod, but ways I’m used to playing it (ghost anyways), the sequence had to be actually inside the word, not at the ends. Is that being followed here by any others?
So that works, though there is another, more common word I’m thinking of.
A couple more from me :
CTM
URYT
I just can’t deal with EINAC. My mind is stuck on the German word for Christmas, Weinacht, and I can’t see past it.
Here’s the hijack part: (I figured this is a good thread to ask in) I’m a Scrabble fanatic (and I do mean fanatic) and always on the lookout for new email game players. If you’re interested, IM or email me (see profile).