which options reliably determine lexical expertise?

I’ve always enjoyed solving word puzzles, although until recently the majority of such puzzles that I came across, particularly in newspapers, were annoyingly easy. This is the reason I started to devise my own puzzles in the early 1990s. I created several repeatable formats, examples of which I posted on this blog when I started in 2009 (Wedgewords; Chainwords; Scramble Six), which provided the challenge that I thought was missing from the word puzzles of the day.

This all changed last year, when a friend on Facebook started posting comments about Wordle. Some of his comments were complaints (“they’re using American spelling”), while some were boasts (solving a given puzzle in just two attempts—see below). I was intrigued and decided to check out Wordle for myself. If I were to describe it in a single word, I would say that it is ‘ingenious’.

The object of the game is to guess an unknown five-letter word, and you are allowed six attempts. After each attempt, letters that are in their correct position in the mystery word are highlighted in green, while letters that are contained in the word, but are in the wrong position, are highlighted in yellow. Letters that are not in the word remain black. This is how the system works in a game in which I needed all six guesses:

This is a good example of a poor second guess, which I was lucky to get away with. I should have tried RAISE, which would still have left me with a lot to do, but at least I would have had all the vowels in their correct positions much earlier. You will notice that I started with AUDIO, which contains four of the five vowels, although I’ve been led to believe that this is not the optimum strategy. According to researchers from MIT, the best starting word is SALET, a word that you probably haven’t even heard of (it’s a mediæval military helmet). When I first read this, I couldn’t help but wonder why LEAST, SLATE, STALE and STEAL aren’t equally as good, but apparently SALET has the consonants in their most common positions.

Anyway, I shall continue with AUDIO, at least for the time being. And I also now have standard choices for my second guess. If the only positive result from my first guess is a yellow A:

…a yellow I:

…or a yellow O:

And so on.

If I have no positive results from my first guess, then this is my second guess:

This last example highlights a recurring problem in Wordle: letter combinations that still offer many possibilities.

This is another example of a game where I just succeeded with my final attempt, even though I had three greens from my second guess:

There are much worse possibilities than this. For example, there are nine possible words ending in –IGHT, eight possibilities ending in –OUND, and seven possibilities ending in –ATCH. One of the four games I’ve lost since I started playing Wordle involved the word FOUND. At the time, I felt that it was unfair to include such words in the list of possible solutions, but I’ve since worked out a strategy for dealing with this particular problem.

Obviously, the chance that I can guess the word at my first attempt is zero—unless I switch to a strategy that involves selecting a different first word each time—but even to succeed in two guesses involves a great deal of luck. Here are three examples:

I should point out that the ‘official’ Wordle, owned by the New York Times, offers just one game each day—this is the one I play. It’s also worth noting that there are two lists associated with the official version: a list of possible solutions (determined in advance), and a list of valid guesses. As I understand it, the list of possible solutions excludes plurals ending in s and the past tense of verbs ending in –ed (e.g., added, rated). There was a controversy recently on the Reddit subforum devoted to Wordle over the word of the day: RIPER. The objection was that comparative adjectives should also be excluded from the official solutions list. Incidentally, this word broke my longest winning streak to date (106).

Anyway, that’s Wordle. If you’ve never played it but would like to try, simply google ‘Wordle’ and choose the game offered by the New York Times—there are quite a few clones, some of which offer unlimited play, and there are also sites that offer Wordle-like games with longer words. I tried some of these, but the five-letter version is the most interesting.

liberation day

At the age of 75, I shouldn’t expect to be doing something for the first time in my life, but I’ve just spent the last 21 days in a single room, never once venturing beyond its door. That door was never locked, but had I decided to leave the confines of this 3×4-metre box, I would have been liable to a fine of up to HK$25,000 and imprisonment for six months.

At least the room has a good view, because it overlooks the western approaches to Hong Kong’s harbour. Consequently, with little else to do, I’ve been taking quite a few photos. A short selection follows, starting with a general view looking northeast:

Ferries make up the majority of traffic on the water, and there are three, operated by different companies, in this image.

I took the next photo to record the cloud nestled around the summit of the mountain in the background. This mountain is Tai Mo Shan (‘big mist mountain’), the highest in Hong Kong at 957 metres (3,140 feet) above sea level:

This photo also shows the spectacular suspension bridge that connects Stonecutters Island (on the right) and Tsing Yi. Incidentally, given the shortage of building space in Hong Kong, you may safely conclude that the buildings in the foreground of this image are a government facility. They are in fact part of a wholesale food market complex.

The next two photos were taken with my camera’s telephoto function to show more details of the bridge:

Hong Kong’s container terminal can be seen behind the right-hand approach to the bridge.

I took the next photo to show a ferry overtaking a barge carrying shipping containers, but it also shows Lion Rock, the imposing summit cliff on the rightmost hill in the background:

The following two photos were taken late on the same afternoon, looking east and west, respectively:

…while this photo was taken on a subsequent late afternoon, looking northwest:

However, this is my best sunset picture:

…while this is another view of the bridge, taken a short time later:

Notice that the weather, as reflected in all the above photos, has mostly been fine, but a tropical cyclone, Typhoon Kompasu, passed 200km south of Hong Kong a couple of days ago. And this is what the view to the east looked like at one point during this event, which prompted the issuing of a #8 typhoon warning (gale force winds expected, all schools closed) by the Hong Kong Observatory:

Finally, this is a view of a section of the food market at 5 o’clock in the morning:

Notice the line of red taxis in front of the food market. I initially thought that this was an odd place for a taxi rank, but the taxis are in fact queuing for the specialist filling station that you can see on the right—all taxis (and minibuses) in Hong Kong run on natural gas!

*  *  *

As you can probably imagine, being confined to a single room with no freedom of movement whatsoever is extremely boring. The relentless tedium of the past three weeks has been punctuated only by the meals provided, which were, for the most part, something to look forward to.

Although the lunch/dinner menu changed every five days, the breakfast menu remained unchanged throughout our incarceration: a choice between an ‘American’ breakfast; a Chinese breakfast; and a ‘healthy option’. I was not impressed by the last of these, but this is a photo of a typical ‘American’ breakfast, which I chose on several occasions:

However, my breakfast of choice was the Chinese breakfast, even though the dim sum selection, in particular, was barely lukewarm by the time it was delivered to our room. The chicken congee (rice porridge) came with both peanuts and preserved vegetables:

Every meal option (breakfast. lunch and dinner) also included a fruit salad consisting of chunks of honeydew, cantaloupe and watermelon, and occasionally dragon fruit, except for the ‘American’ breakfast:

Six items were listed on each lunch/dinner menu, three Asian and three Western dishes. Here are some examples:

pan-fried salmon steak and Singapore noodles

grilled chicken breast with mushroom sauce

pan-fried snapper and fish curry

spaghetti Bolognese

Thai-style duck curry and baked pork chop

pan-fried sole and Yeung Chow fried rice

All the Asian dishes except noodles came with a generous portion of steamed rice (not pictured), while all the Western dishes except pasta were served with mashed potato. I had all the pictured dishes more than once, and the salmon four times!

*  *  *

So what else have I been doing to while away the time? Well, regular readers will know that I like word puzzles and games, and I came up with quite a good one. The idea is to find three, three-letter words that, when strung together, form a valid nine-letter word. This is the only one that Paula could think of:

CAN–DID–ATE

Here are two further examples to show how this works:

CAR–PEN–TRY
GOD–FAT–HER

I’ve managed to think of fifteen other examples, and if anyone wants to try their hand at this game and can think of a word that meets the criteria, please leave a comment below.

Another challenge that I set myself was to see how many five-letter, three-syllable words I could think of. I managed to come up with more than 50. I’d originally thought about four-letter words with three syllables, but I could think of just five, and I don’t think there can be many more.

*  *  *

In case you were wondering about the reason for spending 21 days in a single room, it’s down to Hong Kong’s anti-covid quarantine arrangements. I must say that I consider this to be overkill, especially given that Paula and I have both had two jabs of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Ten days would have been sufficient to determine whether either of us was carrying the virus (we’ve had to undergo PCR tests every three days, in addition to a test at Manchester Airport before boarding our plane and another upon arrival in Hong Kong). Apparently though, the reason for the exorbitant isolation period is the news that fully vaccinated people arriving in Hong Kong were testing positive after more than two weeks. This does seem implausible, but I think I have an explanation: all the tests we’ve undergone since arriving in Hong Kong were not carried out correctly. The swabs used to collect samples for testing were not inserted far enough into our noses and throats. All I can say is this: thank goodness we haven’t had to endure a literal translation of the word ‘quarantine’, which derives from the French word quarante, meaning ‘forty’!

serial changes

I like to play around with words, not with their meanings but with their physical properties. The result is the puzzles that I post here from time to time. I recently set myself the challenge of finding a word in which the first letter can be changed to form another valid English word, then the second letter and so on, at each stage forming a valid word.

This is how this process might work for a four-letter word:

CORE…PORE…PARE…PALE…PALM

However, finding a solution involving five-letter words is much harder. To date, I’ve found five solutions, although I imagine that there are many more. Can you find one?

Incidentally, I’ve tried to find a solution for six-letter words, so far without success. Can you?

matching pairs

The four words in the top row of the following grid have different variants of the same ‘property’:

On that basis, place the following four words in the four empty cells in the grid so that each word is directly below a word that has the same variant of the unknown property:

ASPECT EFFECT REJECT SELECT

There are 4! (=24) ways in which these four words can be arranged, only one of which is correct. The fact that both groups of four words are in alphabetical order is not relevant to the solution of this puzzle, although the order in which the words in the top row of the grid has been arranged is significant.

connecting the dots

I don’t usually post puzzles around this time, but I’ve been struggling with writing for the past couple of months, and I thought that this recently devised poser might serve as a welcome distraction from the more serious matters plaguing the world.

*  *  *

What connects the following six words to the Latin word for ‘bread’?

CHAIN LAITY MAIL PANEL PURE RAIN

This is probably quite easy, but I have another, which I will post in the next couple of days, that I believe is much harder.

arithmetic meets geometry

I was in the bank the other day, and while I was waiting to be served, I amused myself by studying the bank’s logo on the wall behind the counter:

First I counted the number of triangles, then the number of squares. Then I thought: the puzzles that I usually post here are not being solved. Perhaps I should post something that is a little less taxing. So this is the question: if you multiply the number of triangles by the number of squares, what answer do you get?

I’m about to head off to the UK early this morning, and I expect someone to post an answer to this simple question before I get back online sometime tomorrow.

*  *  *

If you found this puzzle too easy, then you might like to try the following, all of which are much more difficult:

What’s the Connection?
Out of Order #2
Rhyme Cryme
A Rotten English Question
A Light-hearted Question
…French and
Four Play
Unusual Relationship Examined

Only the first three have been solved by readers to date.

unusual relationship examined

I don’t usually post any puzzles around this time, but I thought that if you’re stuck at home under some kind of lockdown and you’re bored stupid, then you might like to wrap your brain around my latest concoctions.

What is the connection between the following five words?

ADVENT  DEPART  MANIC  OVERT  PAST

There might well be several ways in which you can connect these words, but the correct solution also allows you to determine that one of these words can also be described as the odd one out, based on the connection criterion that you have used to link the five words.

Here’s a similar puzzle. In other words, can you identify the connection between the following five words, and on the basis of that connection, the odd one out?

MYTH  PATH  TAUT  THE  TOP

Only logic opens gate? Yes!

*  *  *

If you found the above puzzles reasonably easy, then you might like to try the following:

What’s the Connection?
Out of Order #2
Rhyme Cryme
A Rotten English Question
A Light-hearted Question
…French and
Four Play

Only the first three have been solved by readers to date.

what’s next?

 I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical,
 I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical.

W.S. Gilbert, The major general’s song, The Pirates of Penzance.

Instead of my usual cryptic poser, I’ve decided to set a more overtly mathematical problem for this year’s new year puzzle:

3, 5, 13, 19, 31, 43, 61, 73, 103, ??

What is the next number in the sequence, which continues to infinity?

If you found this easy, then try this one from two years ago:

Chainwords #2

pre.con.dis-ion

Take a look at the following prefixes:

PREx CONx DISx

where x is a string of letters—the same in each case—that when appended to the prefix forms a valid English word.

There is more than one solution to the problem as stated, but if I can produce a fourth prefix that when added to your proposed solution also forms an English word, then that solution is invalid.

With this precondition, there is only one solution to the puzzle. Can you figure it out?

some currently unsolved puzzles
A Hard Question
An English Question
A Rotten English Question
A Light-hearted Question
…French and

four play

Once again, I’m about to head off to the UK for the summer, and as usual I have a puzzle that I hope someone will have solved by the time I get back online. However, also as usual, you should expect it to tax your brain cells quite severely (it wouldn’t be worth posing otherwise). Here it is:

What connects the following:
• a football team playing in Italy’s Serie A;
• a nineteenth-century battle;
• an African city;
• an ornamental tree of the subtropics with purplish blue flowers; and
• a Bond villain?

This is an example of an ‘open’ question, meaning that there are more entities that meet the connection criterion. Obviously, there is more than one ‘answer’ to each of these clues, so it will be necessary to identify which of these is ‘correct’.

As usual, I will acknowledge all correct answers, but I won’t actually publish the solution at all unless I’ve received at least one correct answer, and that answer will be flagged up with a ‘spoiler alert’ to give later readers a chance to work it out for themselves.

currently unsolved puzzles
A Hard Question
An English Question
A Rotten English Question
A Light-hearted Question
…French and

the chinese zodiac

Fung Ying Seen Koon is a Taoist temple complex on the hillside a short walk to the south of Fanling railway station. The buildings are modern, so there is little of historical interest here, but my cousin from the UK is staying with us at the moment, and there is plenty to see here, so I had no hesitation in placing it on his itinerary.

Of course, I had looked around the complex before, but I don’t recall seeing sculptures of the twelve animals that comprise the Chinese zodiac:

Most people will already know that unlike the Western zodiac, which is based on the motion of the sun and the planets, Chinese astrology is based on a repeating sequence of animals, each of which holds sway for a year. The changeover from one animal year to the next takes place on the second new moon following the winter solstice, the sequence being left to right in the above photos.

If you look closely at the photographs, you will see that each animal is identified in both Chinese and English. And if you’ve read any of my previous New Year reports, you will know that I consider this identification to often be incorrect. For example, this coming Tuesday marks the start of the year of the pig, yet the animal here is labelled a ‘boar’:

Am I being overly imaginative here, or does this ‘boar’ look surprisingly feminine for a male of the species?

Other examples of inappropriate sex-specific usage include the year of the chicken being mistakenly labelled ‘the year of the rooster’ (it’s identified here as a ‘cock’), and I’ve seen the year of the sheep described as ‘the year of the ram’. Yet none of the zodiac animals should be identified by such sex-specific names!

However, there are a couple of animals where some confusion is probably unavoidable. The most obvious is the sheep:

I have seen sheep with horns like this, but to me this looks more like a goat. And this is where the confusion arises, because Chinese does not distinguish between sheep and goats. The same word (yeung) is used for both.

I’ve always wondered how one particular animal made it onto the list: the rabbit:

Actually, this sculpture is labelled ‘hare’, which I’d not heard of previously. but here’s the rub: as far as I’m aware, neither hares nor rabbits are indigenous to China, which is the only plausible reason for thinking that the words ‘hare’ and ‘rabbit’ are somehow interchangeable.

The question of the eligibility of hares/rabbits to be included in the twelve begs an important question: how were the twelve animals chosen in the first place? And who decided? To my mind, the most important omission is the bear, but lions and elephants are also strong candidates. Even though neither is native to China, both play important roles in Chinese culture. And there are no birds in the twelve. Why?

Finally, I’ve included images of two sculptures that to my eyes don’t look even remotely like the animals they are supposed to represent:

I don’t propose to identify them. See if you can.

an elementary puzzle

I used to post puzzles on New Year’s Eve that were designed to give you a hangover without the alcohol, but nobody seems able to solve my more difficult problems, so here’s another easy one instead:

What do the following have in common?
D ● J ● Q ● W

No! It isn’t quite that easy. If you identify the correct criterion, you will see that it isn’t possible to add any more letters to the list.

…french and

Other languages have not been used in the compilation of this puzzle.

What do the following clues have in common?
• Africa has one.
• China has a great one.
• Arachnid.
• Playing card.
• Freshwater fish.
• Mediæval instrument of torture.
• One of the so-called four evangelists.

Clearly, some of these clues have more than one possible answer, but if you get two answers that appear to match, then it should be possible to connect the rest.

I shall be offline until at least Saturday because I’ll be travelling back to Hong Kong. I hope that someone will have submitted a correct answer before then.

carved in stone

When we say that something is ‘carved in stone’, we are suggesting that it’s unchanging, that it’s the accepted way of doing things. However, I’d like to suggest that in the real world, with real stone, things that get carved into stone are eventually forgotten, and to emphasize the point, I’ve compiled a short quiz involving examples of stone carving in my home town, where the ubiquitous building material until the end of the nineteenth century was a red desert sandstone (Penrith sandstone).

If you are a casual visitor to the town, you may think that trying to find all of these examples would be an interesting way to spend an afternoon, but I should warn you that I suspect that not many Penrithians would know where they are all located, and not all are in the town centre. Most of the images are small, which should tell you that you will need to look up to see most of these carvings.

I’ll start with five simple plaques. Where is Castle View?

Where is the British School, built in 1847?

Where is the Primitive Methodist Chapel, built in 1837?

Where is the Infant School, built in 1833?

And where is Wigan Terrace?

Another apparent street name is Inglewood Terrace, although you won’t find either on any street map or directory. This name has been carved directly into the building:

The next image is a coat of arms:

…while the next carving is also vaguely heraldic:

And now for some dates:

You may guess that the building identifying itself as a bank in the next photo no longer functions in that capacity:

Here are two more conventionally sculptural carvings:

Finally, where is this elaborate decorative carving above a doorway?

There are no prizes for locating these eighteen examples, although if you think you know them, do leave a comment.