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Thirteen Words (Posted on 2003-03-19) Difficulty: 5 of 5
List 13 words such that the first contains an anagram of the word ONE, the second contains an anagram of the word TWO, etc. The anagrammed words cannot be directly in the containing word, so that while "ounce", "sonnet" and "enough" are good for "one"; "gone" and "toner" are not.

Each letter of the alphabet is to be used once as either a first or last letter in one of the thirteen words

Try to use common short words. There's at least one solution with a total of 93 letters.

  Submitted by Charlie    
Rating: 3.6000 (5 votes)
Solution: (Hide)
One solution, with 93 letters total is:
JOINER
OUTWALK
BERTHED
FORUM
VERIFY
UNISEX
AVENGES
LIGHTEN
QUEENING
ZENITH
INTERLEAVE
WAVELET
PARENTHETIC

Computer programming skills are useful in solving this puzzle. Word lists of a couple hundred thousand words are available such as at:
puzzlers.org/ub/wordlists/enable1.txt
and
puzzlers.org/ub/wordlists/mbsingle.txt

However, you need to go to http://www.puzzlers.org/secure/wordlists/dictinfo.php and click on the appropriate word list, then save the file to your own computer or server to use them.

A good way is to form thirteen two-dimensional arrays of words (one for each of the anagrammed words) with the two indices representing the first and last letters, but in alphabetical order rather than as specifically first or last, so that enough and heroine would both be filed in the same slot, so only a triangle of the matrix would be populated. Present each of these arrays as the number of letters in the smallest word fitting the category, then manually go through these 13 arrays looking to complete an alphabetic set, taking into consideration the rarity of letter pairs and sparsity of some of the arrays. That is, start with the most sparsely populate array so you're not later forced to look for an array position there that is not populated, but also look for fortuitous Q's, X's, etc.

As a final step you could then program something to swap letters among the different anagrammed numbers to see if lower letter counts could be gotten by such swaps.

Comments: ( You must be logged in to post comments.)
  Subject Author Date
Puzzle AnswerK Sengupta2023-11-05 06:55:44
89 letter solutionDej Mar2015-05-11 08:35:12
Hints/Tipsre: A Solution - 127 lettersCharlie2003-03-21 08:20:53
SolutionA Solution - 127 lettersfwaff2003-03-21 05:45:41
re: suggestionDJ2003-03-21 02:11:56
SystemAlan2003-03-20 12:00:18
More suggestionsBryan2003-03-20 09:34:20
hmmDJ2003-03-20 07:08:50
Hints/TipssuggestionCharlie2003-03-20 03:28:24
re(3): First steps - 13Charlie2003-03-20 03:22:25
re(3): First steps - 13, 11fwaff2003-03-20 01:17:10
re(2): First steps - 13Gamer2003-03-20 01:08:23
re: First steps - 13fwaff2003-03-20 01:06:04
Hints/TipsFirst stepsAlan2003-03-19 15:58:38
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