MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Index: Category Index

Wordplay

These puzzles involve manipulations of words and often the letters within words, but not in a crossword-like way.

7 Little Words (online word game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 7 Little Dropquotes

acronyms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Instant Replay
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Satellite of Love
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 What The...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Go the F*** To Sleep

adding "in bed" to fortunes

It's a common joke to add the words "in bed" to the end of the fortune from a fortune cookie to give it a new meaning often charged with sexual innuendo.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Fortune Cookies

alliteration

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Goodwin Manuscript
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Fill in the ______
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 ⊥IWPE: Pistol (Event #4)🔫

alphabetic sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Copenhagen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Calmness Before the Storm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Question Mark
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Good Neighbors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Despondent Dynast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Tic Tac Toe
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Najaf to...

alphabet subsets

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 5
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 5 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Any Old Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Spell Casting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Sooner or Later
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 The Hermit Crab

anagrams

analogies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 3 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Set Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Analogy Farm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Locked In

A puzzle in which a text has all the spaces and punctuation removed and is then broken into three-letter groups (trigrams) and usually the trigrams are alphabetized. You are typically given the enumeration (lengths of words in the answer). This puzzle is called anaquote in the NPL, or anaquip, etc. when the text is something other than a quotation. See also vertical anaquote.

_ and _ phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Down the Rabbit Hole 2: Super Magic Samurai Robot Ninja Police Force: Electric Boogaloo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 A Bunch of Ripoffs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Goldilocks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Cemetery Boys
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Sometime After Midnight
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Fruit Around
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 The Salt-N-Pepa Diner
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Crack Some Crypts

Anguished English

(a.k.a. Anguish Languish; heavily distorted homophones of sentences)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 27
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 25: Attic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Poor Constitution
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Team Dynamics
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Heard but Not Seen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Pass da Pasta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Relay Event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Could You Restate That?

ascending and descending letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Track Meet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Obstacle Training (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Divine the Rule of Kings
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Communicating with the Aliens

backswitch

A backswitch is a type of flat from the National Puzzlers' League. In this puzzle, the last letter of a word or phrase is changed and the remaining letters are reversed, resulting in another word or phrase.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer LYNN

before and after

This is like the Wheel of Fortune category, where two phrases overlap by a common word. This is distinguished from word chains because here the parts are whole words or names and usually in short chains of 2 or 3 phrases (3 or 4 parts).

black box (solver must figure out inner workings)

This differs from discover the hidden rules in that these puzzles are more interactive.

Bulls-Eye 20 Questions

In the standard form of this puzzle, a set of words are given in a set of concentric rings and there are a series of questions, often wordplay related, which can be answered with the given words.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1998 Extracurricular Activity Skeet Shooting Club
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tree Rings

cartoon rebuses

Cartoon rebuses are a type of puzzle made popular during the contest craze of the early 20th century and revived in Games Magazine. A single black and white comic-style scene conceals a name or phrase by breaking it up into parts which combine, phonetically, as in a rebus (but without subtraction) to form the answer phrase. Each part is depicted in the cartoon, possibly as a word in a dialogue, a letter on a shirt, a pictured object, or something strongly implied by the scene. These parts are hidden among other irrelevant bits to make a comic scene. A category and the enumeration of the letters in each word of the answer is given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 34: Drawing Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 What The...

charades

Any sort of cluing words by parts, such as automobile + domestic animal = floor covering (car + pet = carpet). It may or may not be phonetic. It may or may not include cluing by gestures as in the parlor game of this name.

common letters

The letters shared by two or more words or phrases. Unlike with letters in same positions, the positions the letters occur in are not considered.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 24: Study
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 History Lesson (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ysera Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Clueless
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 iPod Submarine
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Herschel Hayden
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Strange Garnets
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Construct Objects
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 MATE's Team
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Shalom
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 A Rift in Hades

consonantcies

Puzzles where words share the same consonants in the same order, with any vowels.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Disemvoweled
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Obedience Training (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 1, 2, 3
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Lesser Works
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Radio Play
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Clued Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Peak Adventure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Watership Down
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Synonym Toast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Second Helpings
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 The Myriad Gamut of Hera

cryptic crossword clues

(cryptic crossword clues whose solutions do not go into a grid)

deletions and insertions

Includes curtailments and beheadments, and some deletions of multiple letters. Note that an insertion is simply a deletion in reverse, and with some mechanisms it may be unclear which way to interpret such mechanics, so they are considered together here.

discover the hidden rules

In these puzzles there are rules, usually categorization or transformation rules on words or strings of letters, that you have to figure out from examples. black box (solver must figure out inner workings) has interactive puzzles of this sort.

double letters

dropquotes

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is given with black squares to separate words (which otherwise wrap around the ends of rows), and the letters that go in each column are given, in alphabetized or scrambled order, above that column. The solution is a quotation (whose source is usually not given in the puzzle).

Equation Analysis Test (26 = L. in the A.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 20000 = L. under the S.
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 21 Equations to Solve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 All for One and One for All
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Screen Test
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 A Tearable Puzzle

eye rhymes

Visually similar non-rhyming word pairs, like bear and hear.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bad Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 First Contact Lens

false comparatives

These are akin to badge, badger: Words that look like they could be related by the comparative suffix -er, but aren't.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 For Better or For Worse

false negatives

A false negative is a word that begins with the letters that form a prefix which negates a word, for which the prefix letters may be removed to yield another word, but where the prefix is not actually a prefix and the words are actually unrelated. This is a specific puzzle type in the National Puzzlers' League (where it is generalized to other types of falseness) but the concept is used elsewhere as well. See also false comparatives.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Opposites Are Not Downbeats

false plurals

A flat type from the NPL in which one word is modified into another by applying the transformation associated with the irregular plural of another word. For instance, MAN pluralizes to MEN, so any other A to E change might be considered a false plural based on this model.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Bundles

flats (NPL puzzles)

These are verse puzzles where the answers are words with some sort of wordplay relationship, and they are missing from the verse (typically replaced by other all-caps words, the cue words, which, when necessary, explain which word goes where). The wordplay relationships which flats use can appear in other types of puzzles without the actual verse that makes the puzzle a flat. Many of the wordplay types can be found as their own keywords in the Wordplay category including backswitches, charades, consonantcies, deletions, false flats, heteronyms, homophones, letter banks, letter changes, letter shifts, palindromes, rebuses, reduplications, reversals, and spoonerisms.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 1-1=2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Flat Head
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Flat Containers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Something for Everyone
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

following directions

The original puzzle by this name is where you write some some string of letters and follow a complicated series of steps (such as moving the second consonant to the end) to transform it into something else. Some of these puzzles are essentially like this, but this is Mystery Hunt, so some are vastly more complicated. See also Duck Konundrum.

German sausage puzzle

This puzzle type from the NPL consists of two sets of clues, one set cluing shorter words, and one cluing longer words which are anagrams of two consecutive shorter answers. In the standard NPL version, both clue lists are in order and you're told exactly which short clues each long clue corresponds to. The last long clue wraps around, combining the first and last short words.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Clued Connections

goroawase

A form of Japanese wordplay in which numbers are represented by Japanese words which are homophones for part of all of names of the numbers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 1! 2! 3! 4! 4649!

heteronyms

Heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. They are the opposite of homophones, and are a subset of homographs (which are words with the same spelling and different meanings, but not necessarily different pronunciations).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Complaint Letter
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Stress Test
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Namesake

hidden words

Generally, this puzzle type works like the hidden word style of cryptic crossword wordplay: Answers appear among consecutive letters of words in a phrase, ignoring word boundaries and punctuation, as WORD appears in new order.

hill words

Hill words have letters in alphabetical order up to a point, then in reverse alphabetical order for the rest of the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Wordplay

homonyms

See homophones

homophones

interleaved words

Two (or more) words are interleaved, keeping the letters of each word in order, to form a longer word or phrase. (This type of interleaving is called an interlock in the NPL, or an alternade if the interleaving strictly alternates words.) Alternatively, you may be given a nonsense string and have to separate it into interleaved words.

jigsaw quote

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a 16x16 grid divided into 4x4 sections, into which a quote is to be written, with words wrapping around the ends of lines and black squares separating them. The letters to be filled in are provided, but the words and part-words within each 4x4 block are provided in sorted order, and the resulting groups are also provided in sorted order. Usually the different black squares in different sections distinguish most, but not all groups, and likewise the unique lengths of some letter strings within their groups allow some strings to be placed uniquely. Beyond that you have to figure out how to fit things so that they spell words.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 3: Conservatory

Jumble puzzle

This puzzle, which is syndicated in many newspapers, consists of a set of scrambled words and a row of boxes to enter each one in, some of them containing circles. The circled letters can themselves be anagrammed to form a final answer, usually a punny punch line to complete the joke caption for an accompanying cartoon image.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Lets Get Ready to Jumble

knight's tour

As a purely mathematical puzzle, this is simply a challenge to cover each square of a grid once with a series of knight moves (as in chess). But more commonly this same sort of knight's tour occurs on a grid pre-filled with letters, so that words are spelled out along the path.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 28
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 This Puzzle Needs a Title
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Arena
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Art Tours
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Chairiot Races
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Board Members

laddergrams

A laddergram is a puzzle where sets of three words are clued. In the standard form, the sets are transdeletions and spaces on the left and right of the grid let you enter the dropped letters to form words reading down.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Accumulator
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ladder Dogs

letter adjacency graphs

The letters in some text are nodes in a graph, and each pair of letters which occurs consecutively in that text is connected by an edge (directed or undirected). See also Namystics.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Too Precious For Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Bouncy Bouncy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At Sea
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Island Warfare
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Computer Games
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy (colors and land borders, not letters)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Three Really Good Boys
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 What Comes Next?

letter banks

A letter bank is the set of letters that appears in a word, with all duplicates removed, especially when these letters are anagrammed to spell another word. This category includes puzzles where each letter is given or used only the first time it appears in some answer, even though this does not spell a word.

letter changes

(many variations are included here, but see also misspellings)

letter links

What is the correct name for this puzzle type? It is the one where a list of related words must be discovered, where a set of boxes is given for each word, and between each pair of consecutive words in the list, all repeated letters are connected by lines.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 2: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Killing the Audience
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Common Thread
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Matchbox Twenty
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 The Mad Scientist's Assistant

letter shifts

These are restricted anagrams where only one letter changes position relative to the others.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Eschatology (in modification)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Edge of your Seat FUN!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Wheels Go Round and Round
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spotted Tower Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Unfortunate Al
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Analog Circuitry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Field of Clovers

letters in same positions

lipograms

Text written deliberately to avoid using one or more letters, rather tha opposite of a pangram.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Where Was I?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Great Gadsby
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Peak Adventure

mangled clues

In this puzzle type, a set of clues are given without spaces and with some of the words modified according to a rule you have to figure out. Then solve the clues. Typically, you will have to apply the rules again to the same or other clue answers, perhaps in reverse, to get a different set of answers. See also discover the hidden rules.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trubled Monicas
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Stick the Landing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Travel Planning
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Ladies First
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Altered Beasts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Trickster Tales
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Everybody Must Get Rosetta Stoned
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Transformations

misspellings

Namystics

Namystics are a puzzle type similar to letter adjacency graphs in that the letters of a name are connected in order, but any enclosed regions are filled in, hiding some of the lines. This name for the puzzle was used in Games Magazine and in the form they became known there, the letters are arranged in order in a circle, but you have to figure out where the alphabet starts to identify the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 15: Drawing Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Ornaments
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Spore Prints

numbers associated with or in words

This is akin to associating 66 with Phillips, or 101 with dalmatians.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Blue Star Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round VI Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 This is a Recording
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Execution Grounds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Not All There
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Lesser Works
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Arbor Day Town/Pi Day Town Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Too Many Secrets

odd man out

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Unprecedented Discovery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Parrrrty
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in Translation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Odd Man Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Road Trip
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Snap Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Recover the Pokémon Core Memory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Is There a Draft in Here?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Conjuri's Request

palindromes and palindromic sequences

pangrams

A pangram is text that contains every letter of the alphabet.

paragraph puzzles

(as the term is used on Grey Labyrinth - you have to figure out the secret rule that determines what words or sentences are valid)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Space Invaders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 What Incarnation of Palindrome are You?

phonetic letters and numbers (NV = envy or single letters)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Shop
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Buenos Aires Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Well-Coordinated
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Absolute Power
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Powder Monkey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Payroll
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Talk Like a Pirate Day Town
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 It's Easy, Cutie!

phonetic puzzles

(phonetic versions of puzzles commonly based on letters rather than sounds)

printer's devilry

(This is sort of the opposite of the hidden word type of Cryptic Crossword clue. Sentences that make a sort of half-sense are given; they make better sense when a word is inserted somewhere within the sentence, possibly changing word breaks and punctuation.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 37: Angularium
MIT Mystery Hunt 1998 19.28 Quotation Puzzles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Eoanthropus dawsoni
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 4 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 pluHarmony
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Loss by Compression
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wait, What Did You Say?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Travelogue
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 The Robber
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 PClueRS
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Completing the Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 The Devil's in the Details

puns

quotation puzzle

See dropquotes

quotefalls

See dropquotes

quote square

In the standard form of this puzzle type, you get a grid with three letters in each square, with clues for words to be eliminated, one letter per box, in a row or column for you to determine, with the remaining letters (one per box) spelling a message.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 3
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 35: Library
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Another Dimension (Round 4 Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 A Process of Elimination

rebus

The most common kind of rebus is the one from the Concentration game show: A word or phrase is clued, often partially or completely phonetically, via a series of smaller words, with plus and minus signs indicating how to combine the parts; they are combined in order, so the material to be removed by a minus part must exist in the result of the operation immediately before the minus sign. Any manipulation of words involving both adding and subtracting parts is classified here; for ones where parts are only added, see charades.

reduplications

A word is repeated two or more times to form a longer word (like yo, yo-yo). In the NPL this is a flat type; the answer may be an arbitrary phrase, but the answer consists of the same sequence of letters repeated two or more times. A phonetic form of reduplication is called a Word Avalanche on Reddit.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At the Canyon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Not Again!

repeated letters

reversals

words or phrases that are reversed by letter, sound, or word

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 12: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Stuttgart
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Input/Output
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Stage Lines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Get Your Dog Back...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crimes Against Cruciverbalism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Clued Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Town Hall Meeting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 MIT Confessions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Analog Circuitry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Attack of the Lobsters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 First Contact Lens
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Endless Knots

rhyme schemes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Reflections on a Milky Steed Who's Quite Amphibious, Indeed
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 "Line, please."

rhyming words

riddles

MIT Mystery Hunt 1998 Junior Lab
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Jack and Jill or Janet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Joke-O-Lantern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Don't Get Eaten
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 For Your Eyes Only
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Subterranean Secrets

rotated letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Directions in Writing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 Enter the Perpendicular Universe

Scrabblegrams

Messages that are 100 letters long, using exactly the distribution of letters from a Scrabble game (including free choice for the two blanks).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 The Times They had

silent letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 28: Hall of Ancestors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Complaint Letter
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Whistle Training (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 ERROR: PUZZLE DISABLED

solitaire hangman puzzle

This is a hangman game designed for you to play without direct interaction by the word-chooser. The number of letters is given, and a pair of lookup tables provide a way for you to check whether and where in a word a particular letter appears, without spoiling yourself by seeing the results of nearby letters.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Hang 'Em High

sound changes (phonetic letter changes)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Making a List, Checking it Twice
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Least You Could Do Is Phone Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 I Knew Weird Al Yankovic, and You, Sir, Are No Weird Al Yankovic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Joke-O-Lantern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 ⊥IWPE: Pistol (Event #4)🔫

spoonergrams

See spoonerisms

spoonerisms

Named for a Reverend Spooner who tended to mix up words like this on accident, a spoonerism is the swapping of initial consonant sounds in the words of a phrase. Generally, if a word starts with a consonant cluster such as BL or STR, the entire cluster is swapped. Sometimes a small connective word in the phrase is unchanged, as in WHACK AND BLIGHT for BLACK AND WHITE. Sometimes the initial consonant sounds of three woirds are rotated among the three words. The NPL uses this as a flat type called a spoonergram.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 6
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Sao Paulo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Passive Muzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Gag Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spittle Loon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Turn of Phrase
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Wolf in the Fold
MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Baking Bread
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Field of Clovers

supervocalics

See vowels, phrases containing all

things shaped like letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 The Alphabet Book

Tom Swifties

A Tom Swiftie is a pun involving a quotation from a character usually named Tom, which is followed by a dialogue tag of the form Tom said ___ly. The pun is that the adverb chosen is appropriate in some way to the message he said.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Chatterbox
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Swifties

transdeletions and transadditions

A transdeletion is a combination of deletion and anagram, deleting one letter from a word and rearranging the rest to spell another word. A transaddition is the opposite operation.

This is a flat type in the NPL, typically using a sequence of 4 parts related by transdeletions.

The laddergram is a puzzle based on transdeletion chains of 3 words.

transpograms

A flat type in the NPL in which some portion of the beginning of a word is moved to the end to make a new word, without otherwise changing the order of any of the letters, as in Tesla, slate. A more specific variant of this form of wordplay is Verlan.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 The Junk Pile
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Take Two
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 The Venetian
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Under Pressure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Crossword of the Ouroboros

trigrams

Groups of three letters. For a specific puzzle type which uses trigrams, see anaquote.

unistems

A unistem is a string of letters which can have exactly one letter added to it to allow the group to be anagrammed into a new word (from a given word list).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 The 10,000 Puzzle Tesseract

valley words

Valley words have letters in reverse alphabetical order up to a point, then in alphabetical order for the rest of the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Wordplay

vertical anaquote

This variation on the anaquote uses trigrams printed vertically to spell out a message which is broken onto three equal-length lines.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1998 19.2352 Web Word Puzzles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Chowing Down

vowels, phrases containing all

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 7 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Venntersections

wacky wordies

Wacky Wordies are an old Games Magazine feature. Words or phrases are clued in which part of the answer suggests a way to write letters, and the remaining part of the answer is written in this way. It is possible that those letters are written in two or more groups whose relationship is indicated by the unwritten words. For example:

STAND
I

represents "I understand."

MIT Mystery Hunt 1998 9.ZZZ Abstract Dream Analysis
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 The Obligatory Wordsearch
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 Rebus

Waterfall puzzle

This word puzzle has several sets of clues. In each set, the first clue is complete. Each successive clue has blanks for missing letters which are filled in by the letters of the answer to the previous clue, in order. A grid is provided to enter the words in each set in a single column. A few unspecified rows will spell out other answers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Trickster Tales

Wheel of Fortune

This puzzle type is named for the game show, and is based on the idea of being able to guess some puzzles immediately, with no letters in it, based only on the lengths of the words and the punctuation provided. Various kinds of clues may accompany the blanked-out messages.

Word Avalanche

See reduplications

word chains

(the end of one word overlaps the beginning of the next; see before and after when the overlapping parts are words)

word deletions

One word is deleted from another word to leave a third word, such as deleting LET from DELETED to leave DEED. The NPL uses this as a flat type.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Middle-See
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Clued Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Fortune Cookies
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Nature Hike

word functions

See discover the hidden rules

word ladders

A word ladder is a series of letter changes with the goal of getting from one word to another, with each step forming a valid word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 To a Monster
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Grizzly Ale
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Snakes and Ladders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Broken Bridge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2019 Clued Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 Wizard Woods
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 Step by Step Ladder
MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 The Strat

wordplay (other)

word stack

A word stack is a grid for a list of related words arranged so that some matching letters fall in the same columns; these letters get a single tall box to indicate the repetition. The words may be arbitrarily staggered left or right, and sometimes arbitrarily ordered, in order to increase the number and height of these shared letter boxes. Usually only a few letters are initially given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Art of Succeeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Rose By Any Other

word substitutions

A flat type in the NPL in which a word contains a shorter word within it, and the shorter word is replace with a different word to create a fourth word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 Book Spade

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