Thoughts on Puzzle 25 : MIXED SIGNALS

Thanks, just solved it a minute ago though XD! Hint for 6: What happens at the end of the 9th solution.

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Ahhh. Now I got it. So it was none of:

  • Wore his lawn,
  • Wise Horn Law,
  • Hi Worse Dawn
  • An Wild Horse
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Are all 9 lines of clues having interlaced words like that or do some of them interlace in another way as well, as shown in the example of the puzzle’s text at the bottom? I mean like WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA.

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Is the answer to the puzzle in one or two words?

Ah yeah, another case of “If I didn’t misspell the answer I would finish this quicker” with an instance of “But I checked this answer already!”

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Wenomechainsama tumajarbisaun,
Wifenlooof, eselifterbraun.

Took the coding route; that wasn’t so short.
Using a dictionary of words which is not too big (61K words after removing the 1 and 2 letter words) resulted in a reasonable running time (5 seconds) to find combinations.
The issue is that the search resulted in many possibilities (except for the 3rd clue), and up to 9 possible letters in each clue.
Combining the sets of letters from each clue gave me a single possible word from the dictionary, which was NOT the answer. So the answer was not in my dictionary!
I had to look at the sets of solutions to determine the reasonable / likely one, and the corresponding letter.
This gave me the solution, a word I had never heard of.

So, it is a proper 9-letter word from the English dictionary, right?

Yup, got 45 solutions for this one !

Yes, it is a proper 9-letter word from a large enough English dictionary.

I tried my program with a very large dictionary (370K words), it came up with 666 9-letter words. Sure enough, the correct answer was in this set of 666 words, but no easy way to identify it (there are other normal sounding words in this set)

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I would like to know if the dictionary was a .txt file or a .json file?

Where did you get data for your dictionary?

dwyl/english-words: A text file containing 479k English words for all your dictionary/word-based projects e.g: auto-completion / autosuggestion (github.com)

Here is one I found with 466K English words. I hope it helps.

Solved it with a combination of a Python script that generates a list of possible three word candidates and then manually going through the list to see which one fits best. There were a lot of potential candidates to look over, so this took me about 3 hours.

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Yup, that’s the very large dictionary I used afterwards.
The smaller one I used initially came from here: JUST WORDS! Dictionaries and Word Lists
(USA English)

You could have used this
Word List Database Tools (thewordfinder.com)
And go for Word lists with letters at specific positions on the page. Probably easy this way.

Let me know if you get your 9-letter word here.

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Yes, I found the word there. Thanks for the link.

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It’s available here. It might just be easier to figure out a couple of the easy ones (like the first, sixth, seventh, or ninth), then rule out the remaining words that you got from the search by taking out letters unavailable in the scramble. I almost got the right answer this way from just two solutions. Only two of the letters were wrong and that’s because the dictionary I was using didn’t have the word (found out after the third).

Thank you for this website though! would be very helpful for later riddles!

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To be complete: using the smaller dictionary in the first part of the program that solves the clues, then using the larger dictionary to look for possible 9-letter words within the combinations of letters resulted in 8 words, containing the correct answer.

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Are the triplet words in most of the clue lines, ‘verbs’?

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