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Sandy Wood
Brain Game: y, r u?
by Sandy Wood - October 7, 2009 - 7:30 AM

bloghead_braingames.jpg

Today’s Brain Game requires a cell phone. Don’t own one? Just pretend that you do. In fact, pretend that your cell phone has a texting feature, and that the numbers 2 through 9 represent letter groupings in the typical fashion:

phone

Like most texting phones, to reach a letter of the alphabet, you’d press a particular number to cycle through its letters until you reach the one you want. Given the above image as a guide, here’s your puzzle. Good luck:

Come up with an eight-letter English word
that would require pressing each of the
8 letter-coded numbers at least once.

Here are some ANSWERS.
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Comments (17)

  1. endothermically

    posted by David on 10-7-2009 at 9:07 am

  2. sorry, forgot the eight letter part.

    posted by David on 10-7-2009 at 9:08 am

  3. I got \waterlog\.

    posted by Matthew on 10-7-2009 at 9:44 am

  4. Enthalpy, blowiest, uneasily, waterlog

    posted by Madi on 10-7-2009 at 9:56 am

  5. electronically

    posted by graham on 10-7-2009 at 10:28 am

  6. Harrumph. I pitched this idea to Neely Harris in August.

    The best I’ve been able to do is 39425284667.

    http://www.phonespell.org/combo.cgi?n=39425284667

    posted by James on 10-7-2009 at 11:49 am

  7. Stinkwad

    If it is only an 8 letter word, you can only use each number once.

    posted by Jeffrey on 10-7-2009 at 1:13 pm

  8. I am terrible at this. But an interesting story is that I’ve owned a cell phone for years and have never sent a text message. Ever. I don’t plan to either. Apparently I’m not cool.

    posted by Nick on 10-7-2009 at 2:15 pm

  9. I’m at work, and all I can think of is \hellhole\.

    posted by Rico on 10-7-2009 at 3:36 pm

  10. My favorites are foxtails, keypunch, knitwear, playtime, steamily, twangler (or twangles), uneasily.

    posted by Dinosaur on 10-7-2009 at 4:09 pm

  11. I used to do this all the time with typewriters … trying to think of 8-letter words that used each of my fingers exactly once. It’s the same deal.

    posted by Dinosaur on 10-7-2009 at 4:10 pm

  12. adroitly

    posted by Bryan on 10-7-2009 at 4:27 pm

  13. Aloha Nick,

    Right with you bud. Why use a form of antiquated telegraph when you’ve got voice capability? Yeah, I’ve heard all about privacy, etc, but come on, unless you’re cheating on a test of some kind is it that hard to find a private place or time to speak?

    posted by Hawaiian on 10-7-2009 at 5:27 pm

  14. Steamily

    posted by Tony on 10-7-2009 at 5:28 pm

  15. LATESHOW

    posted by Scott on 10-7-2009 at 6:59 pm

  16. I started with a list of 8 letter words and eliminated ones that didn’t work, here is what I ended up with:
    blintzes, cryolite, dicotyls, dilatory, enthalpy, epicotyl, foxtails, haylofts, idolatry, interlay, jarovize, keypunch, kyanites, lipocyte, penality, playtime, sodality, steamily, tensibly, triazole, unfairly, valorize, waterlog.

    posted by Stan on 10-8-2009 at 2:05 am

  17. idolatry

    posted by Mon on 10-8-2009 at 2:22 am

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