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Carburetor is a car part, but prosecutable is not

My wife and I like to listen to PuzzleMaster Will Shortz.on NPR.

This week’s challenge is from one of my favorite puzzle makers Merl Reagle:

Take the word carburetor, add two letters and rearrange the result to name another car part. And the answer is one word. What car part is it?

It took 1 minute to write a program to solve this, 6 second to run it, and it’s pretty clear that “prosecutable” is not a car part

If you learn the answer from this post, to be fair, please do not submit your answer to NPR.

See also:

Sudoku puzzles screen capture

The mechanics of Sudoku

Create your own Word Search puzzles

A Discounter Introduces Reductions: Multiple Anagrams

carburettors

counterblast

fusobacteria

neuroblastic

prosecutable

protuberance

scrobiculate

subcarbonate

tuberculomas

tubocurarine

turbocharger

nStart=SECONDS()

LOCAL ox as dictionary.dict

ox=CREATEOBJECT("dictionary.dict")

*Find all words into a table.

?ox.FindMatches("*")

?ox.Words.Count

CREATE TABLE words (word v(25))

FOR i = 1 TO ox.Words.Count

      cWord=ox.Words.Item(i-1)

      INSERT INTO words VALUES (cWord)

ENDFOR

cStr="carburetor"

SELECT * FROM words WHERE LEN(word)=LEN(cStr)+2 INTO CURSOR foo

SCAN

      nCnt=0

      FOR i = 1 TO LEN(word)+2

            IF SUBSTR(cStr,i,1)$word

                  nCnt=nCnt+1

            ENDIF

      ENDFOR

      IF nCnt =10

            ?word

      ENDIF

ENDSCAN

?"Done in ",SECONDS()-nStart

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    Where did the dictionary.dict ActiveX object come from?

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    I wrote the Dictionary.Dict object. It can be downloaded: see the Multiple Anagram link above

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2006
    How about an anagram like this.  You get one or more words that are basically just a supply of letters.  You also get the format of the Here's an example where the output is three words:

    TEST LEAVEN PRUNE _ _ | _ _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _

    The solution:  NET PRESENT VALUE

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2009
    I was using a program that was yet another TLA and I wanted to create a mnemonic to help me remember

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    Several years ago, my wife and I were walking through a local shopping mall. At the time, there was some

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2009
    PingBack from http://uniformstores.info/story.php?id=18709