Tag Archives: Hamlet

It’s Follow-Up Friday: The Puzzle’s The Thing! edition

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’m posting the results of our #PennyDellShakespearePuzzles hashtag game!

You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie, hashtag games on Twitter, or @midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment on Comedy Central.

For the last few months, we’re been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny/Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was Penny/Dell Shakespeare Puzzles!

Examples for plays might be “Hamlet-terboxes” and examples for quotes might be “The Stars and Arrows of outrageous fortune.” Anything Shakespearean is up for grabs here!

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny/Dell Puzzles came up with!

Puzzly Plays

The Merry Wives of Wizard Words

The Two at a Time Noble Kinsmen / Two by Two Noble Kinsmen

Cymbeline ’Em Up

Timed Framework of Athens

As You Like It Figures

Romeo and Julietterboxes

The Taming of the Shrudoku

Love’s Labour’s Missing List

The Tempest of Sudoku

Romeo and Juliet’s Double Trouble Love Affair

Quotes that Fall into a Winter’s Tale

Puzzly Quotes

“Suit the action to the crossword, the crossword to the action.” (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2)

From sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sunrays.”

“The very substance of the ambitious is merely THE SHADOW of a dream.” (Hamlet)

“Off with their Heads and Tails!” (Richard III)

“To Beat, or not to Beat, the Clock: that is the question.” (Hamlet)

“All Four One, he kissed me. I loved my Blips the better A Perfect Ten days after.”

“But, soft! What light through yonder Window Boxes? It is the east and Juliet is the Sunrays.”

“Frailty, thy name is Word Games.”

“Crosswords do shake the darling buds of May.”

“Alas poor Brick by Brick, I knew him Horatio.”

“Word Play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the king.”

Exit What’s Left, pursued by a bear.

“What a piece of Framework is a man.”

“Bull’s-Eye Spiral of newt.”

“To be or not to be, that is the Big Question.”

“Crosswords pay no debts.”

“A pair of star-Crossword lovers take their life.” (Romeo & Juliet)

From Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a Right of Way?”

“Double, Double, Toil & Double Trouble.” (Macbeth)

“Where Plus Fours art thou, Romeo?” (Romeo & Juliet)

“To be or not to be…that is the Quotefall.”

Someone even offered up a puzzly version of one of Shakespeare’s most popular characters, Quotefallstaff.

Plus our fellow puzzlers on Twitter offered up some terrific entries themselves! @CheriPalmisano submitted a quote — “My cherry lips have often kissed your bricks…(by brick) which are stuck together with cement” — and hashtag warriors @HereLetty and @aLICIaR802 joined in the fun with “In my mind’s Bull’s Eye Spiral” and “The Comedy of Errors: Me when I do a logic problem” respectively!

Have you come up with any Penny/Dell Shakespeare Puzzles of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

PuzzleNation wordplay = Now radiant puzzle ploy

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[Alternate anagrams include “Puzzle patron, now daily” and “Plow into any rad puzzle.”]

Anagrams are a cornerstone of modern pen-and-paper puzzling.

They make frequent appearances in cryptic (or British-style) crossword clues, and many puzzles and puzzle games — from Anagram Magic Square and Text Twist to Secret Word and Bananagrams — rely heavily on anagrams as an integral part of the solve.

I’ve written about them several times in the past, but for the uninitiated, an anagram is a reordering of the letters in a word to form a new word or phrase. PEALS anagrams into LEAPS, PALES, LAPSE, SEPAL, and PLEAS.

As the old joke goes, “stifle” is an anagram of itself.

But the best anagrams rearrange the letters in a word into something related to that word. Fans of The Simpsons may recall that Alec Guinness anagrams into “genuine class.”

There are numerous examples of great anagrams all over the Internet. Here are a few classics:

  • The eyes = they see
  • Clint Eastwood = Old West action
  • Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one
  • Dormitory = Dirty room
  • A decimal point = I’m a dot in place
  • A gentleman = Elegant man

One of the best online anagram programs out there is hosted by wordsmith.org, and at the top of their page, they remind us that “internet anagram server” anagrams into “I, rearrangement servant.”

You can find some unexpected surprises when you play with anagrams. Did you know that William Shakespeare anagrams into both “I am a weakish speller” and “I’ll make a wise phrase”?

There are entire forums online dedicated to terrific anagrams, some fiendishly clever, others impressively insightful. (Of course, sometimes crafty punctuation makes all the difference.)

Madame Curie becomes “Me? Radium Ace.”

Monty Python’s Flying Circus becomes “Strongly psychotic, I’m funny.”

The possibilities seem endless when you delve into longer phrases. I’m going to close out this tribute to anagrams with two of the most amazing ones I’ve encountered during my time as a puzzler.

The first involves the iconic line as humanity took its first steps onto the surface of the Moon:

Neil Armstrong: That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind

anagrams into…

Thin man ran; makes (a) large stride, left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!

[I’ve included both what Neil said and what was broadcast back to Earth. Hence, the A in parentheses in both versions.]

The second takes one of Shakespeare’s best known lines and offers some engagingly meta commentary on the play itself:

To be or not to be, that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…

anagrams into…

In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of-tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

So whether you’re playing Scrabble or tackling David L. Hoyt‘s Jumble, anagramming is a worthwhile tool that belongs in every puzzler’s skillset.

Do you have any favorite anagrams, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Let me know! I’d love to see them!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!