Carolyn Kivett

Travel-size Chemical Word Scrambles (Easy to Medium): Verbal Puzzles Using Chemistry's Periodic Table Carolyn Kivett

Chemical word scrambles are an exciting new form of word puzzles. You don?t need to know any chemistry! These chemical word scrambles will appeal to all word puzzle lovers, whether or not they also enjoy science. Each word is composed of symbols from the periodic table, instead of letters; but you don?t need to be familiar with the periodic table to solve the word scrambles. Here is an example: The words BRaIn PoWEr are composed of the following symbols for chemical elements: B for boron, Ra for radium, In for indium, Po for polonium, W for tungsten, and Er for erbium. In chemical word scrambles, the words have been scrambled by rearranging the symbols ? not the letters. Symbols that have two letters ? like He for helium and Nd for neodymium ? can?t be split or have their letters reordered. ??? This creates a significant distinction between ordinary word scrambles and chemical word scrambles. For example, the symbols Er, V, S, and Es may be combined to form the word SErVEs, but not the word SEVErs because symbols would have to be split to form SEVErs. One neat difference between ordinary word scrambles and chemical word scrambles is that chemical word scrambles allow us to make use of a vocabulary of longer words without effectively increasing the difficulty of the puzzle. For example, the word VErBAl is a 6-letter word, but only a 4-symbol word. When trying to rearrange the symbols Al, Er, B, and V to form the word VErBAl, there are fewer permutations to consider compared to rearranging the 6 letters A, l, e, r, b, and v to form the word verbal. We saw this as an excellent opportunity to make word scramble puzzles that involve a vocabulary of longer words. ??? The level of difficulty of this Chemical Word Scrambles puzzle book is EASY to MEDIUM. This book includes words that have 4 to 6 symbols, and therefore 4 to 12 letters; most of the words have 5 to 9 letters. Each puzzle features a challenge word made by rearranging the first symbol of each word. A unique feature of this book is that there is a Hints section at the back separate from the Answers section, for puzzlers who may be stuck and want to check just the first letter of the solution. ??? This travel-size book comes in a convenient size for traveling, and uses a different word list than the full-size books.