Puzzle of the Day

Puzzle of the Day is on pause for spring break (😱😱😱), but I'll have fresh new puzzles daily starting Monday, April 20. In the meantime, I'll leave the webform up in case anyone wants to send a puzzle suggestion, a request, or some random nonsense!

Yesterday's puzzle:

In International Morse Code, each letter of the alphabet is represented by a sequence of dots and dashes. Complicating matters somewhat, not all these sequences are the same length; the most common letters (E and T) are represented by a single dot and a single dash, respectively, while rarer letters require up to four dots/dashes.

Today's puzzle is to decode the four Proofnik first names written below, one on each line:

It's up to you to figure out where one letter ends and another begins!

Admittedly, this is kind of hard, so I have provided a few clues below which you can use or not use as you see fit. Highlight the clues in your browser to read them.

• Clue #1: The Proofniks are in 9th, 8th, 7th, and 10th grades, respectively.
• Clue #2: The names in this puzzle collectively contain only   five   different letters.
• Clue #3: These names have  4 ,  4 ,  6 , and  7  letters, respectively.
• Still stumped? You can click to see the Morse code with spacing between the letters.

Answer:

The names are Anna, Anna, Hannah, and Narayan. My apologies to those who thought I was up to something tricky with the first two names; it is indeed possible for different words to be represented by the same sequence of dots and dashes, but I don't know if there are any examples among Proofniks. (Perhaps one of you would enjoy writing some code to find out? Let me know if you do!)

A fun fact about the name Anna is that it's a palindrome in English, but an antipalindrome in Morse code. If you read it backwards, every dot becomes a dash and every dash becomes a dot. (The result is, of course, a delicious kind of bread.)

Peter M. proposes the following puzzle: which Proofnik's name, with 5 letters, is represented by? I figured this out without knowing most of the Morse Code alphabet, so it can be done.

Huzzah to solvers Anna, Anna, Harper, Kailey, Mr. Gregg, Peter M., Zachary, and Zachary!