June 27, 1997
More Handy Helpers
Word Puzzle Reference Sites
Last week we looked at some useful reference sites for solvers of word puzzles. Here are some more that I have found useful.
Crossword Helper
This is another site for completing crossword solutions when you have some of the letters. Performing a search using r . m . r . . . . . , for example, yields:
remarkable, remarkably, remarriage, remarrying, remorseful.
Not only does it help to solve crosswords, but it provides five-word short stories!
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Just type in a word to find quotations containing that word. Since this site uses an online copy of the 1901 edition of Familiar Quotations (presumably for copyright reasons), you won't find any 20th-century quotations. So, performing a search using the word web won't reveal anything said by Bill Gates, but will reveal a line from Shakespeare's "All Well That Ends Well" that seems to be a prophesy of the Internet:
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
The International Lyrics Server
Since I discovered this site, it is one of my great favourites. You can search for song lyrics by artist, album or full or partial song title. It is also useful for checking who has recorded what songs on which albums, getting lists of songs with certain words in the title, etc. For example, entering imagine in the Song field and clicking on Find Songs will list, as well as the song Imagine (John Lennon, also recorded by Joan Baez), the songs Who Would Imagine A King (Whitney Houston), Hard To Imagine (Pearl Jam), Imagine You (Sponge) and Imagine A Man (Who).
This Week's Puzzle
See if you can solve this cryptarithm (each different letter represents a diffent digit). FORTY + TEN + TEN = SIXTY Solution to Last Week's Puzzle
MARGE lets NORAH see SHARON's telegram.
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duJour.com
Modest it's not. duJour is a big, brash, very commercial site, with great graphics and oodles of oomph. Daily puzzle sections include Riddle du Jour, MondoTrivia, WordAngst, The Labyrinth, The BigByte. There are prizes, prizes, prizes! The site claims over to have over 120,000 visitors each day (!) - there's no doubt it has found a winning formula.
Omnibus
This is described as a Scrambly-Riddly-Rebusy-Charady-Punny Kind of Word Game. That just about sums it up! It's funny, it's different, it's addictive - and it looks nice. There's a new puzzle every two or three days. Try it!
rec.puzzles archive
This is a website archive of puzzles that have been submitted to the rec.puzzle newsgroup. There are no stunning graphics, it's text only, but there's a vast number of puzzles here - enough to keep you occupied for months. The subject matter covers a very wide range: analysis, analogies, arithmetic, cominatorics, cryptology, etc etc. Text-only geometry puzzles might seem to be be a bit of a downer. Nevertheless, you're sure to find plenty in this treasure-house to intrigue you. And there's none of the "noise" that you get with the live newsgroup!
The Puzzle Museum
This amazing Website is devoted to "Mechanical Puzzles" - that is, the sort you can pick up and give to to somebody to take apart, put together, find the secret opening -burr puzzles, Rubik cubes, jigsaws, mazes, etc. The owner of the site - James Dalgety, who owns Pentangle, a famous puzzle-manufacturer in England - gives a classification scheme with 14 main classes and over 100 subclasses. He illustrates fascinating puzzles from his vast historical collection, together with his plans for creating a Puzzle Museum in a beautiful old building in Somerset, England. Absolutely fabulous!
Crossword America
A great site for crossword enthusiasts. There's an excellent daily crossword to be downloaded (uses Lyriq software which can also be downloaded free), acrostics, cryptograms, word searches, and much more. The drawback is that you have to pay to subscribe to it.
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Puzzles
