Ten nine-letter words have been separated into units of three letters. The units have been randomly put in the below list. Can you determine the original 10 words?

   rec rar ant htn fer ort
   ent cer por sin lig ian
   lio row use tfo eth ive
   sca ing ing lib ely dig
   som dif far est imp mho

different, important, and lightning were in some of the other puzzles, so those popped out right away.

librarian: lib made me think of liberate or library. I saw librar and thought "oh, but librar-y won’t be one of the words… oh wait! Maybe librarian?" and there it was.

portfolio: portfo sort of lined up visually, and that made me see portfolio.

farmhouse: mho looked very interesting, and didn’t look like an end or a beginning. I looked for units that ended with a vowel so I could try to make words like scam or something, but that didn’t prove fruitful. I looked through a little more carefully and saw farmho, which lead me to farmhouse.

scarecrow: I knew row was probably going to be an ending, and as I happened to be looking at sca, scar seemed like a possibility, and there was scarar and scarec, which lead me to scarecrow.

something: The other ing was still out there, and ething made sense, which lead me to something.

The last two were pretty hard. I assumed that ely and est had to be endings, though I saw that ive could be too. I couldn’t figure things out for a while. I saw digest, but since I was stuck on est being an ending, I kept trying to put a unit before digest. Then I finally saw digestive, and then it just took a moment to see sincerely.

Posted by nikki on 2004-09-07 12:57:52