Word puzzles

Midword puzzles

There is an eight-letter word whose third to sixth letters are DUST. What is that word?

The answer is industry. Easy? Let's try another.

There is an eight-letter word whose third to sixth letters are ACHE. What is it?

The answer is teachers. This one is very difficult because the sound of "ache" in the answer word is radically different from the sound of ache as an independent word.

What if the middle is LINE? The answer is ugliness.

Also, there is a nine-letter word: ___ICU___. That word is ridicules or ridiculed.

Occasionally, the question may provide unusual letter combinations at the middle.

• _ _ _ W W _ _ _ : glowworm
• _ _ _ H H _ _ _ : withhold
• _ _ _ P F _ _ _ : campfire
• _ _ _ T F _ _ _ : platform
• _ _ _ H T _ _ _ : rightful
• _ _ Q Q _ _ : niqqud

Tricky puzzles

Many puzzles make you think in the wrong way from the beginning.

What is the most common word whose third letter is H?

You would think that H is used as an individual consonant. Such words do exist, like coherent and dehydrate, but they are not used very often. If you realize that H is more commonly used in letter combinations like TH, SH and CH, you might come up with ache. But the correct answer is other.

If you got that one right, you might want to try another.

Think of 25 words that begin with "par".

You know most of them: part, park, party, parties, parts, parks, pare, pared, parked, parking, participate, participated, participates, participation, participating, participant, participants, partial, partly and partially. That's 20. The key is to think of the prefix para-.

The third puzzle is more difficult.

Think of a word that contains "YI".

Here the letters Y and I must be adjacent and in the right order, meaning that words like "cynical" are not accepted. One answer is dying. Other answers include defying and justifying. All of them have the suffix -ing.

The fourth one is similar to the third.

Think of a word that contains TC. (Not etc.)

T and C together can be found in the letter combination TCH. Answers include itch, scratch, and stitch. (Not to mention bitch.)

The fifth one is similar to the fourth.

Think of a word that contains a double W.

The extremely rare double W is found only in compound words such as glowworm.

And now, for something completely different ...

Dwarf mobs quiz lynx.___, kvetch!

The choices are GIF, JPG and PNG. The correct answer is JPG, because when you fill it in the sentence becomes a perfect pangram.

Find an eight-letter word that ends in -demic other than epidemic and pandemic.

Answer: academic.

Crossword puzzles

Crossword (a misspelling of crissword) puzzles are popular. Back in the good old days, crossword puzzles were very easy, mostly because they were one-dimensional. But modern crosswords are insanely difficult. There is a HUGE crossword puzzle that needs you to fill in more than a thousand words, but it takes forever to load. Meanwhile, you may practice your meager crossword-solving skills on this one:

Today's Crossword Puzzle*

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Animal allergic to french fries  5 Sign language used by blind amputees 10 End result of an infinite loop 14 Albert Schweitzer's favorite flavor 15 Playing chess on a parabolic hyperboloid 16 Zanzibarian beetle, colloquially 17 Antonym for Horatio Wilburforce (1803-1847) 20 Fictional fragrance 21 Unwaxed candle 22 Artificial eggplants 23 Wine that goes best with ytterbium 25 Business end of a hula hoop 26 Standard abbreviation for _____ 27 Prequel of Hawking's A Brief History of Time 28 What a stegosaurus says when provoked 32 Anonymous author of My 437th Book 34 SI prefix for zero 35 Dessert topping found in pants 36 Irrational fear of cheese doodles 37 Machine used for scaring trees 38 Future geologic era 39 Urine-based cheese made in Scotland 41 Fossilized slices of bologna 42 One who is fluent in Spanglish 43 The answer to this crossword clue, spelled backwards 44 A banana with way too many teeth? 45 Calvin Coolidge's longest speech (verbatim) 47 A hairstyle made famous in Liechtenstein 50 An unanticipated surplus of mayonnaise 53 What to feed to a rabid zebra 54 How the hell now, brown cow? 55 Morse code for dummies 58 Sentient piñata, theoretically 59 A popular typeface for hieroglyphics 60 Least important physical property of peanut butter 61 One who degreases monkeys for a living 62 Moose's colonoscopy 63 Alternative use for a wingnut

1 Popular dance style with a 17/5 beat  2 Don't do this when skydiving  3 Medical term for itchy fingernails  4 Why idiots fall in love  5 Drowning in a river of tapioca  6 Electrified celery  7 Forbidden part of speech  8 Klingon word for doily  9 What not to stick into 39 Across 10 Exquisitely obese 11 Indescribable gardening tools 12 87,013th word of the novel War and Peace 13 A seemingly random string of letters 18 Enigmatic jar full of phlegm 19 22nd digit of the human body 24 Collective noun: "A ___ of solipsists" 25 Monochromatic rainbows 27 Holy guacamole (eccl.) 29 Worst misspelling of "Albuquerque" ever 30 Roman numeral for one zillion 31 The Canada of Canada? 32 Acronym for 32, 36, 39, and 42 across 33 Country with the most gerbils per capita 34 Answer to a rhetorical question 35 Susan B. Anthony's third greatest accomplishment 37 The last letter of this word is missing 40 Largest possible serving of toothpaste? 41 In mathematics, the least interesting number 44 Moving sideways through time 46 Humming an entire opera off-key 47 What John Smith is famous for 48 Scientific instruments for measuring pancake residue 49 Plural form of "ssss" 50 One third of a bicycle 51 Immersing oneself in a warm bath of Coke Zero 52a The darkest side of the sun 52b Explosive facial hair? 53 To translate into Urdu, badly 54 Smallest city of South Dakota 56 Making shit up, metaphorically 57 The end, finally

* 23 x 23 grid purchased separately.

A miscellaneous puzzle

1. You lost half of your body, but now you are all right. What happened to you? Answer: your left side left your body.

Hint: →

A see-also puzzle

• This link is not real
• Nor is this one
• Click me, your computer would explode
• Never trust any of the above