H E L L O
my name is
Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Tuesday, April 20
You've probably seen this kind of sticker on the back of a semi:
HOW'S MY DRIVING?
CALL (xxx) xxx–xxxx

The other day, I saw a variant of this sticker. It said

REPORT ILLEGAL WASHING

What kind of vehicle was it stuck to?

Hint This vehicle was at a construction site.

   


     Note: Clicking "Submit" will send your response to Dr. Shapiro.

Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

As you might suspect, different languages have different versions of Scrabble tailored to their alphabet and vocabulary. For example, the Icelandic game comes with Ð, Þ, and Æ tiles, while the Spanish set includes CH, LL, RR, and Ñ. Along with unique letters, each set also has a different distribution of tiles and point values; C will get you 10 points in Finnish, where it occurs only in borrowed words.

What letter makes up 20 of the 102 tiles in the official Malagasy-language Scrabble set? (Note: Malagasy is the westernmost language in the Austronesian family, with 25 million speakers in Madagascar.)

Solution Sometimes you can draw conclusions even from a small sample. The sheer number of A's in Malagasy and Madagascar suggests—correctly, as it turns out—that A is an extremely common letter in Malagasy, worthy to appear on one-fifth of the Scrabble tiles. (For comparison, the most common letter in English, E, appears on 12% of the tiles in English-language Scrabble.)

Now, it would be linguistically irresponsible of me not to mention that Madagascar is not actually a Malagasy name; the Malagasy form is Madagasikara (which has even more A's), but ultimately the name comes from Marco Polo severely bungling both the pronunciation and the location of Mogadishu (a Somalian city more than 1,000 miles to the north). Freaking Europeans, man.

The "honest" version of this puzzle might note that Malagasy is related to such languages as Malay (bahasa Malaysia), Javanese, and Ma'anyan; plenty of A's there too. Or, to make the answer a wee bit obvious, all I'd need to do is tell you a little about the history of Madagascar's capital: King Andrianjaka named it Analamanga, then King Andriamasinavalona renamed it Antananarivo.

For the curious:

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Maddy, Jacob C., Inca, Peter M., and Kate. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March 2020 to March 2021.