[Guest]

You are suddenly faced with a string of letters that have been jumbled. They have been printed on 26 pieces of paper like so:

In other words, a is over M on the first piece, b is over R on the second piece, and so on. Your task is to arrange the majuscule letters such that they spell an English word over seven letters long and simultaneously write it out backwards in minuscule letters. There is only one solution.

What is the word?

Edited October 27, 2010 by tartolb

[superprismatic]

ALCYONIUM

[araver]

ALCYONIUM

muinoycla

Meaning and Definition from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913): Alcyonium = A genus of fleshy Alcyonaria, its polyps somewhat resembling flowers with eight fringed rays. The term was also formerly used for certain species of sponges.

Picture here: Wikispecies: Alcyonium

[Guest]

You both, of course, got the answer right. What method(s) did either of you use?

[araver]

You both, of course, got the answer right. What method(s) did either of you use?

Taking pairs (e.g. A, M) and trying to find words that begin with one and end with the pair.

Also noticed that if the length is odd then either O or S is in the middle.

I admit I used a tool for quick browsing more obscure English words (as English is not my first language).

Crossword solver

[Guest]

Very good, araver. You have solved it so easily.

[superprismatic]

You both, of course, got the answer right. What method(s) did either of you use?

I have a list of approximately 450,000 English words. I compiled this list some

years ago from many sources on the web. From my experience, about 3% of the

entries are not actual English words (spelling mistakes, proper names, weird slang,

etc.). I simply wrote a program to look through the list and print out

candidates that satisfied your requirements. I checked all the putative words

in the Webster's Third. The program found two words from the list -- ALCYONIUM

and CALAMUMI. The second of these didn't check out to be an actual English word.

But ALCYONIUM turned out to be good. My solution is quite jejune compared to

araver's solution which required exercising some neurons! Nice puzzle! Thanks.

[Guest]

That is really cool, superprismatic. My programming skills are naught. It nevertheless appears you would make easy work of my list of problems on this subject!