Intro
Take a common five-letter word. If you add an “e” to the end you’ll get a common six-letter word. or add an ‘e” after the second letter to get a different six-letter word, or an “e” after the fourth letter. what word is it?
The technique
I used the strange dictionary built in to my Raspbery Pi, in /usr/share/dict/american-english.
Key command
$ egrep ‘^[a‐z]{5,6}$’ jhwords > /tmp/five‐six
That leaves us with 11897 words (use wc command to learn this).
Now just look at the six-letter words containing an “e” at the end:
$ egrep ‘^[a‐z]{5}e$’ five‐six > e‐at‐end
Down to 784 words.
Now strip off the terminal “e”.
(steps skipped)
And then…
Candidate word list
ameba ampul aorta avers blond brows cloth corps demur expos fauna final flora fondu grill hears hydra karat larva loath local madam moral pleas psych regal scrap sever sooth spars strip swath teeth tibia uvula vulva zombi |
You can scan by hand – the answer jumps out at you.
Conclusion
Another NPR Weekend Edition puzzle is solved by use of some simple linux commands.
References and related
Another NPR puzzle similarly solved.
If you don’t have that dictionary on your RPi, you can install it: sudo apt-get install wamerican .