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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Thursday, September 14
You might be amazed to learn that no births or deaths were recorded in England from September 3, 1752 to September 13, 1752. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the population of England at the time was in excess of 5 million people.

What was the reason for this historic anomaly?

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

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!

Solution The book is Green Eggs and Ham, which veterans of my Constrained Writing workshop will know was written on a dare to create a best-selling book using only 50 words. Here's the full text if you want to remember how it goes.

As for the missing word... I would not eat them here or there; I would not eat them anywhere!

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Harper, Lucia, Jessica, Summer, Cloe, Jacob C., Yana, Inca, Maddy, Riley, Leo S., Anna K., Mr. Gregg, Zachary S., and Barbara (Maddy's mom). 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.