E N D I V E
E _ _ _ V _
What other common 6-letter English word, besides ENDIVE, has an E and a V in the spaces indicated?
For several years Sunday Puzzle has been a regular feature at Daily Kos. It features an assortment of puzzles with political themes and educational tidbits mixed in.
Starting this week, there is also Sunday Puzzle for beginners.
These beginner diaries are intended as a fun introduction to the kinds of puzzles you'll find each week in Sunday Puzzle. Those puzzles are intended for group puzzle-solving, and so are deliberately made to be challenging. That can make them difficult for a new person to get a handle on. The puzzles in these beginner diaries are designed so that people can solve them on their own and become more familiar with the types of puzzles to be found in the regular diaries.
The main feature in the Sunday Puzzle diaries is usually an acrostic, so that will usually be the main feature in these Sunday Puzzle for beginners diaries as well. Here's one to get you started.
Today's acrostic has 15 clues: five rows with three answers per row. A complete explanation of how these acrostics work can be found right below the clues.
1. Drug smugglers
2. Feathers
3. Thrashes
4. Fictional uncle
5. Take up again
6. Calculate
7. Broker
8. Red rock
9. Fictional doctor
10. Border
11. CORE co-founder
12. Greatly in excess
13. Stretch one's neck
14. Actor Art
15. Steinbeck's Row
The rules for this type of acrostic are simple: for each row, the answer is of increasing length, such as a five-letter word, a six-letter word and a seven-letter word. Each next size word is formed by adding a letter to the previous answer and scrambling.
In the box in-between each answer, put the extra letter. For example, if your answers were HEARD, ARCHED, and CRASHED you'd place a "C" in the box between HEARD and ARCHED and an "S" between ARCHED and CRASHED.
When you've filled in the grid with all the answers and all the added letter, the columns made up of the added letters should spell out a set of related words. It might be a person's name, such as CHARLES DICKENS (spelled out in two columns). It might be the title of a book or movie, such as GONEW ITHTH EWIND (spelled out in three columns). It might be almost anything. Your challenge is to figure out what the verticals say and what they mean.
Here's an illustration of what a completed grid might look like:
Have fun! And if you enjoy this puzzle, consider trying out the regular Sunday Puzzle diary, which will go up in about half an hour (at 9:30 am Eastern time).