Do You Know Your Proverbial Alphabet? Puzzle master Will Shortz quizzes one of our listeners, and has a challenge for everyone at home. This week's competitor is Barbara Lawrence of Lake Wales, Fla.

In this blog, I share 10 word puzzles that reveal how the letter-to-sound correspondence connects to meaning. Let’s do a sample together. You begin with a letter of the alphabet; in this case, B .

Alphabet seemed, as a colleague put it to me this week, “menacingly infantile.” That’s not a mistake. (Google declined to speak with me on-record about the rebranding.) ...

Jigsaw puzzles had their origins in the mid-18th century as a handsome pedagogical tool, the artisanal alphabet blocks of their day. These “dissected maps” drilled children in geography.

On-air challenge: This is a phonetic puzzle. If I asked you to say the cry of a ghost plus a letter of the alphabet to get a bunch of flowers, you'd say BOO plus K to get BOUQUET. Now try these ...

Word construction puzzles based on alphabet characters. ... You don't find them, you choose them. And when you do, you're on the path to fulfillment. Subscribe. Recent. Issue Archive.