Sandy Wood
Brain Game: OK MIND?
by Sandy Wood - July 15, 2009 - 7:30 AM

bloghead_braingames.jpg

Today’s Brain Game is an open-ended puzzle, so any answer you come up with – as long as it follows the guidelines – will be correct. Enjoy!

Here is a map showing the correct two-letter postal abbreviations for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Using this as a guide:

Your goal is to find the longest possible word in which
every pair of adjacent letters appears on the list.

As an example, the word “coal” would NOT count; while CO (Colorado) and AL (Alabama) appears on the list, OA does not. The word “mine“ WOULD work, however, since you’d have MI (Michigan), IN (Indiana), and NE (Nebraska).

After a few minutes of doodling, I came up with the word “malarial,” which connects Massachusetts (MA), Alabama (AL), Louisiana (LA), Arkansas (AR), Rhode Island (RI), Iowa (IA) and Alabama again (AL). Plenty of other words will work as well, of course. And be creative! Brand names, personal names, whatever. The point here is to exercise your brain and have fun. Make sure to include your best answer in the comments section of this post. We’d love to hear from you!

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Comments (31)

  1. Parine – of, or relating to a titmouse (like feline and canine)

    Not very long, but I found it amusing, although that probably speaks volumes about my sense of humor….

    posted by Karthik on 7-15-2009 at 8:56 am

  2. Marine.

    posted by Richard on 7-15-2009 at 9:50 am

  3. I found ‘scone’
    SC, CO, NE.
    that’s all i’ve found so far, and i think that’s just because i’m hungry.

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 10:13 am

  4. Maria

    MA, AR, RI, IA

    Flaky

    FL, LA, AK, KY

    posted by AaronGNP on 7-15-2009 at 10:22 am

  5. Steven–Scone doesn’t work unless we include provinces (ON).

    posted by Curtis on 7-15-2009 at 10:23 am

  6. Scaring–you know, as soon as we stop being stingy and admit New Guatemala.

    posted by Curtis on 7-15-2009 at 10:26 am

  7. ‘Malarial’ is probably the longest with all adjacent letters.

    But if you consider adjacent pairs (like ‘COAL’), there are good ones like ‘arcade game’, ‘mainland’, ‘Coca-Cola’ and, fittingly, ‘all-America’.

    posted by Chris on 7-15-2009 at 10:38 am

  8. New York Sidewalks!!!

    NE, WY, OR, KS, ID, DE, WA, AL, KS.

    KS is a repeat, but due to technicalities, (no rule for repeats), i’m squeezing it in the comments!

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 10:44 am

  9. i misread the rules. darn. i was happy with that one too lol.

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 10:46 am

  10. That’s okay, Steven. You should be happy with that one. I just made the rules a bit more limiting this time around.

    posted by Sandy Wood on 7-15-2009 at 10:49 am

  11. AR-RI-IA = Aria
    HI-ID-DE = Hide
    RI-ID-DE = Ride
    WI-ID-DE = Wide
    WI-IN-NE = Wine

    posted by Nick on 7-15-2009 at 11:00 am

  12. Best I got is:
    SC-CA-AL-LA-AR = scalar

    posted by Nathan B. on 7-15-2009 at 11:23 am

  13. MA-AR-RI-IN-NE = marine

    posted by Nathan B. on 7-15-2009 at 11:24 am

  14. ok, redemption. lol

    War in Mind, By Lauryn Hill.
    WA, AR, RI, IN, NM, MI, IN, ND

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 11:31 am

  15. The best I came up with was SCALAR

    posted by Eric Y. on 7-15-2009 at 11:47 am

  16. There are a ton of words, but I couldn’t find any that were longer than “malarial.” Pity double letters don’t work.
    The longest I could find was “Scalar,” unless you count “scalarial,” which I have seen used but can’t verify it as a defined word.

    posted by Abby on 7-15-2009 at 11:50 am

  17. Marine and Vicar

    reCAPTCHA: Mr giggly

    Just thought that was funny…

    posted by Mortal Light on 7-15-2009 at 12:05 pm

  18. Hilarial (slang for something that’s funny)

    HI, IL, LA, AR, IA, AL

    posted by John on 7-15-2009 at 1:04 pm

  19. Just realized my slang/fake word doesn’t fit the rules. Dang, should’ve gone for something more outrageous if I was making up words.

    posted by John on 7-15-2009 at 1:10 pm

  20. You know you’re a geek when you spend your entire day at work obsessing over a brain game, trying to figure out all possible permutations. I got:
    arial, arid, flaky, gala, hid, hide, hilal (as in kosher), hilaria, hind, malarial (of course Sandy already had the longest), marine, mind, larine, me (the shortest), mine, Moria (yeah, I know dwarfish doesn’t count), pal, par, parial, rial, rid, ride, rin, rind, scar, vara, varia, war, wide, win, wind, wine, winy. If you use the post office list of abbreviations (which includes territories like Virgin Islands, American Samoa, et al) you also get via, vial, vin, viny, was, alas, gas, gut, incas, vine, pride, and prine. Wow. I really spent way too much time on that.

    posted by Matt R. on 7-15-2009 at 1:49 pm

  21. All I could get is an arcade game:

    Georgia+Louisiana+Georgia= Galaga

    posted by Jacob on 7-15-2009 at 2:22 pm

  22. wala wala

    posted by rob on 7-15-2009 at 2:30 pm

  23. Matt, after i realized my mistake, i made a spreadhsheet of all the abbv.’s and the other states that could follow it, at work. LOL

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 3:06 pm

  24. oh, and john, hilarial works. just squeeze Rhode Island in your gap.

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 3:07 pm

  25. i can’t hear you! LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA

    (sorry for triple post)

    posted by Steven on 7-15-2009 at 3:09 pm

  26. I don’t have one to offer, I just wanted to say that this is a great puzzle!

    posted by Frank on 7-15-2009 at 3:50 pm

  27. The New York Times crossword a few Wednesdays back had this as a theme… words made with state abbreviations outlined the puzzle. Malarial was on there!

    posted by Mary on 7-15-2009 at 4:02 pm

  28. mind= MI, IN, ND

    posted by Kristen on 7-15-2009 at 4:09 pm

  29. How about Utne? Ohh, should i have mentioned competitor?

    posted by Jeffrey on 7-15-2009 at 7:01 pm

  30. Well, Matt, if it makes you feel better, it might make me more of a geek to have written a program to parse the word list I found at http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby/mwords.html to find possible words. I didn’t find anything longer than malarial, but here are all the words 6 letters or longer (I think scoria is my favorite of the bunch):

    corial, garial, larine, malaria, malarial, malarin, marine, palala, parial, parine, scalar, scarid, scoria, warine

    posted by Seth on 7-15-2009 at 7:35 pm

  31. Thanks, Frank! And thanks to everyone who posted their answers.

    posted by Sandy Wood on 7-16-2009 at 1:24 am

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