In 1876, a collection of Puzzles and Oddities was published in New York, compiled by the author Mary Dawson. The book was a compilation of brainteasers that had either been previously published in older collections or passed down by word-of-mouth from one generation to the next—or, as the subtitle to Dawson’s book put it, these were puzzles that had been “found floating on the surface of our current literature, or tossed to dry land by the waves of memory.”
One of Dawson’s trickier puzzles—in which the identity of one word has to be figured out based on other words that can be made from its letters—is reproduced below. Can you work it out?
Take Our Latest Quizzes: