I have picked up a certain word, changed each of its consonants into a letter C and each of its vowels to V.
Then, to cause you extra excitement, introduced an error i.e. changed one of the letters (either replaced C by V or vice versa).

It is Obvious that the word is not an esoteric one and may be recovered by considering the following hint: the number 12544 will lead you to the distorted word, you will correct it to get the original one.

Enjoy!

Here is a stream of consciousness of my odyssey; not sure if my final destination will turn out to be Ithaca or not.
I wrote this out before realizing 12544 has been changed to 12100, but I'm going to give my answer the same anyway; with a change at the end to reflect the new number.

This was very confusing at first, but then I realized the distortion of the word does not occur until after it has been transformed into a series of Cs and Vs.  So the 12544 clue points to some combination of Cs and Vs.
I looked at converting 12544 into different bases, but none of these showed C and V as the only digits.
Maybe a Roman Numeral composed only of (C,V).
But 12544 is XMMDXLIV where there is a bar over the first X
Or 125 44  is CXXV XLXV
Maybe other divisions of the 5 digits; I'm not going to try them all.
The prime factorization of 12544 is 2^8 * 7^2  so maybe a 10 letter word with 8 consonants and 2 vowels, but fixing the glitch, then maybe 7 consonants and 3 vowels.  Too many word possibilities. Perplexus only has 9 letters.

I note 12544 is a perfect square = 112^2.
Ha:  112 could be a clue for CCV or VVC;
Probably CCV since C comes before V and the clue is 112.
And since one of the letters needs to be flipped,
the possibilities are:  VCV, CVV, CCC, plus less likely: CVC, VCC, VVV ;
But eliminate CCC and VVV since no 3 letter words are all vowels or all consonants.
CVV (also called CVC code) is the 3 digit code on the back of a credit card.  Fun, but not a word.

VCC could be EGG.  There are many 3 letter words that might fit.

Posted by Larry on 2023-06-29 17:25:53