Today's Puzzle
Wednesday, September 2
I have two questions for you today. First, the alphabetized list below contains all but one of the distinct words from what classic book?
a, am, and, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you
Second, what word is missing from my list? (The word in question is the only multisyllabic word in the book, and by far the longest word at 8 letters.)
Hint
Many of the words have rhyming partners. Look for a lonely one!
Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution
The Malay word
rambut translates into English as 'hair'.
What is the translation from Malay to English of duri ?
Hint (what are those pictures of fruit about?!)
The fruits displayed at left are called rambutan and durian.
Solution
Duri means 'thorn'. Essentially, rambutan is 'hairy thing' and durian is 'thorny thing', which is pretty accurate if you ask me.
Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Cloe, Milo, Newton, Nicholas, Yana, Charlie, Maddy, Nico, Inca, Anna J., Leo S., and Zachary S. 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 to June 2020.