Solution to Word Salad
READY TO EAT
Word Salad is, for me, very close to the Platonic ideal of a puzzle. It’s lean as hell, with not a single element wasted. It also came in a beautiful package, with gorgeous faux-mystery novel cover art by our illustrator, Sarah Hemberger. And of course it starts with a pun — and ends with one.
You’re presented with excerpts from three books: each 10 sentences long, with 10 words in each sentence. Each cover also contains 10 words: 2 in the title, 6 in the subtitle, and 2 in the author name.
There’s no clear way in, so the only thing to do is look for patterns. Some are easier to spot than others. For example, each sentence in the first book features a variety of apple: Fuji, Jazz, Opal, Gala, etc. The second book features tomatoes: currant, cherry, grape, roma, etc. And the third one features peppers: anaheim, Thai, ghost, bell, etc. And in fact each book author’s last name is also a variety of that same food: McIntosh for the first, Moneymaker for the second, and Guajillo for the third.
This continues for every word in every sentence: each word is one of 9 (not 10) words of a given category. And those categories belong to a meta-category across all three books: varieties of veggies, sports terms, features a double letter, etc. The best way to approach this is to map it all out in a spreadsheet, and if you’re like us (and may of you are), color code it.
The grid for book one: Carrot Scandal.
The ten meta-categories and their respective sub-categories:
| Meta-category | Book 1 | Book 2 | Book 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| of color X | red | yellow | green |
| type of X food | apples | tomatoes | peppers |
| contains bigram XY | TH | ND | CR |
| rhymes with X | -ight | -ale | -oon |
| by author X | Sherlock Holmes | Sue Grafton | Stephen King |
| follows X | head* | heart* | hand* |
| terms in sport x | Baseball | Cricket | Soccer |
| ccXcc | ccAcc | ccEcc | ccOcc |
| starts and ends with X | C-C | M-M | D-D |
| from language X | French | German | Arabic |
After mapping it all out, you can notice that each line features one word that belongs to no categories. In the pic above, they’re highlighted in black. (The line’s missing color is indicated to the left of the row.) Reading the acrostic of those words, in order of their positions, left to right, and from book 1 through 3, gets you this message: FIND TRIPLETS AND PUT IN COVER ORDER.
What triplets? Well, you have 300 words; 270 of them were categorized, and 30 of them were used for the message. If you split the 30 into triplets, that would give you 10, which aligns nicely with the puzzle’s use of 10 meta-categories.
Sure enough, the 30 words can be collected into 10 categories that align with the 10 meta-categories used to sort all the other 270 words. Put in the order used on each book covers, you have:
3 things that are RED
3 words from titles of ELLROY books
3 words from ARCHERY
3 words with DUTCH origin
3 words that fit the pattern _ _ Y _ _
3 words that fit the pattern T…T
3 words with double O
3 words that follow EAR
3 words that rhyme with AY
3 varieties of THYME
Read the first letter (or operative letter) of each of those things, and you get your answer: READY TO EAT.
Notes
This puzzle got 3,072 correct entries in the 5 days the submission window was open.
It is very hard to find ten words that don’t any of 10 categories. We went through many iterations of this puzzle, swapping out false hits on each tern. We had to go deep on etymology and make sure that all our outlier words weren’t from French, German, or Arabic. And that none of the other 27 words at the end weren’t accidentally Dutch.
We also went through many iterations of our clue phrase, because we had some very tight constraints for those outlier words.
In the first version of this puzzle, each row had 9 categorized words, and one outlier, but the columns did not hew to that constraint, because we wanted control over the word order so the grammar would sound halfway sensible. Our friend Jonah suggested we give up on the grammar and modify the grid to be a Latin square, so each column has a unique set as well. This of course was the right call, but I didn’t realize how difficult that can be to do by hand (while watching a movie) and spent way too long on it.
The cover art is inspired by a book imprint from the ’20s called The Mystery League. I found them a couple years ago, well after founding my company, and fell in love with their covers. So I suggested to Sarah that she model the Word Salad covers off of them, and she knocked it out of the park. She recreated the font by hand, using the covers as models. Here’s an image search for “mystery league books” that brings up a bunch of them.
Notes from solvers
Cathy and Michael write: “We went down a huge rabbit hole in Word Salad, after we eliminated all but the final 30 words. We were convinced the final solution had something to do with tea, and discovered that Alinea’s tea supplier was founded by two guys who met while working at Adagio Tea. And as it turned out, some of those final 30 words, like Elmo and Nock, were listed as flavors of tea on the Adagio website. We were so convinced we were on to something, but did get a huge laugh out of it afterwards.”