Description
Arrange the wheels such that at least two 4-letter words appear at the same time. Each wheel contains the alphabet A - Z in order. It is remarkably difficult to find even one pair of words, but there are more to find. It is very addicting...
There are 17,576 possible unique positions of the wheels that will show 456,000+ 4-letter combinations. Only a few of these wheel positions will yield two words at the same time. An example: LAWN & PEAR will appear at the same time.
This is an historical puzzle dating from 1882 when it was made from paper. The inventor, WH Rieff, called it a Spelling Toy and Puzzle and it was meant to be both educational and entertaining. It has not been made in any format for generations to our knowledge.
You can use any word which can be found in a standard English language dictionary or Scrabble dictionary. Like Scrabble, types of words which cannot be used are abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes or words that require a hyphen or an apostrophe. Proper names and words that are spelled with a capital letter also cannot be used
Note: This is also an item that may have appeal to educators in developing word, spelling, and language skills.
Made in Hudson, Florida. Thanks to Rob Stegmann from Rob's Puzzle Pages and the Jerry Slocum Museum at Indiana University for the idea for this very interesting puzzle.
UPDATE! Jeff Scott Brown wrote a program for us which identifies all possible answers based on the scrabble dictionary. Thanks Jeff! There are 353 word pairs and 14 triple words possible! This far exceeds our expectations as after hundreds of hours manually searching by a dozen people we had only found 93 word pairs and zero sets of three words. It will be supplied with your order.
Level of Difficulty: Level 3