Sandy Wood
Brain Game: Unlock This Puzzle
by Sandy Wood - January 6, 2012 - 7:30 AM

Welcome to a new Friday Free-for-all challenge at the mentalfloss.com Brain Game. Today’s puzzle is quick to try, if not to solve. Here we go:

Which one of the following three-letter sequences does not belong with the other four, and why?

TYU
HJK
RCE
VBN
DFG

Here is the ANSWER.

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Comments (12)

  1. TYU! It’s the only sequence that if you flip each letter, it still looks the same since “T”, “Y”, and “U” are all symmetrical.

    posted by JoeD on 1-6-2012 at 9:11 am

  2. RCE is the only group that can form a word with the insertion of one letter.

    posted by PartiallyDeflected on 1-6-2012 at 9:34 am

  3. RCE is also the only sequence that ends an English word (divoRCE, faRCE, foRCE).

    posted by John S on 1-6-2012 at 9:54 am

  4. Wow — lots of alternate answers today. Good thinking, folks!!

    posted by Sandy Wood on 1-6-2012 at 10:06 am

  5. This would have been more difficult had I not had a keyboard in front of me.

    posted by Greg on 1-6-2012 at 10:14 am

  6. and here i was trying to insert the word KEY into the sequences…

    at least i’ve learned to read the clue.

    posted by Wayne Stevens on 1-6-2012 at 11:33 am

  7. I thought they were words missing letter.
    I got hijack, defog, rice, but got stuck on tyu and vbn

    posted by Lola on 1-6-2012 at 2:12 pm

  8. Here’s a more subtle one. If you think of the alphabet as being circular, all the sequences except TYU are in alphabetical order, even though intermediate letters are missing. It was the first thing that occurred to me.

    posted by Passerby on 1-6-2012 at 3:04 pm

  9. I also got RCE, but for a different reason. It’s the only one of the five that is an airport code (Roche Harbor Airport, WA, USA).

    posted by cepx on 1-6-2012 at 5:16 pm

  10. Aww, man. I would’ve never figured this out because my keyboard is arranged with the Colemak layout.

    posted by teh yoshi on 1-6-2012 at 5:26 pm

  11. I thought it was vbn because the rest sound like phrases and words: rice, thank you, defog, hijack

    posted by Lui on 1-6-2012 at 5:56 pm

  12. vbn because its the only one whose first letter doesnt have a horizontal component

    posted by nobody on 1-7-2012 at 2:55 am

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