Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Word Puzzle

What do each of the following words have in common?

chef
facade
hotshots
microscope
racketeering
indivisibility
unpremeditatedly

Answer: if you let a = 1, b = 2, and so forth, then each of these words has the property that the first half of the word sums to the same number as the second half.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

They look like "additive squares"... But I only checked the first 4 ones.

Numerology is the answer :)

A from דקלב said...

If every letter corresponds to its place in the alphabet, the sum of the first half of each word equals the sum of the second.

Anonymous said...

Gur unyirf bs rnpu jbeq unir gur fnzr ahzrebybtvpny jrvtug.

(Is there more than that?)

Bernie Ibneer said...

It was "hotshots" that almost gave it away. "Intestines" would've been a similarly easy clue. As would "horseshoer" and "teammate".

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Yes, that was deliberate. I thought it would be too hard otherwise.