Same consonants, different words
Take the vowels out of English and a strange thing happens: words that have nothing to do with each other collapse into the same shape. That is the puzzle behind Lost Vowels, and it is also a small window into how the language works. Here are some of the most striking cases, why they happen, and how the game keeps every puzzle fair.
Words that share a skeleton
Each pair or group below has identical consonants in identical order. Only the vowels tell them apart:
- Meat, meet and moot all have the consonants M and T, with two vowels between them.
- Seed and side, or said, share S and D.
- Pork, park and perk share P, R and K.
- Horse, hoarse and hearse share H, R and S, and all three sound alike.
- Wheat, white and whet share WH and T.
- Argon and organ share R, G and N, with a vowel at the start of both.
- Boron, barn, baron and born share B, R and N.
- Lead, load, laid and loud share L and D.
Some of these pairs differ in the number of vowels as well as which ones. In Lost Vowels the blanks show you exactly how many vowels sit in each gap, so M__T (two blanks) can be meat, meet or moot, but never mate or mute, which would be shown as M_T_.
Why English does this
English spelling uses five vowel letters to write around twenty vowel sounds, while its consonants are comparatively stable. Many of the most common words in the language are short, built from one or two consonants and a vowel sound. With so few consonants to go around, collisions are inevitable.
Writing systems have long exploited the same fact. Hebrew and Arabic are normally written with consonants only, and readers supply the vowels from context. Text-message shorthand does something similar: "pls" and "txt" are readable because the consonants carry most of the meaning.
How Lost Vowels keeps it fair
If a puzzle could be answered with two different words, it would not be fair to accept only one. The game deals with that in three ways:
- Categories narrow the field. You always know whether you are looking for a food, an animal, a city or a scientific term. M__T in Food & Drink is meat; in English Words it might be meet. _RG_N in Science & Nature is argon, not organ.
- Answers in a category do not share a pattern. Before a puzzle can appear, the game checks it against every other answer in the same category and rejects any that would share the same consonants. Within a category, a skeleton points to a single intended answer.
- A daily set never repeats a pattern. No two puzzles in the same ten share an answer or a skeleton.
That still leaves ordinary words outside the answer list. If you type a real word that fits the consonants but is not the answer, it is marked wrong. The category, and the clue if you take it, are there to steer you to the right one.
Using it to your advantage
Knowing that skeletons collide makes you a better player:
- When a word fits, check it against the category before you type it. If it does not belong there, keep looking.
- List the alternatives. For a short skeleton, run through the vowel options quickly: A, E, I, O in each single blank, and the common pairs (EA, EE, OO, OU, AI) in each double blank.
- Remember that a wrong guess is free, but only three are allowed. Use your first guess on the most likely word for the category, not on the first word that fits.
Try these
Each pattern below is shown in the same form as in the game. Which word fits the category?
- P_RK in Food & Drink. Pork.
- WH__T in Food & Drink. Wheat.
- _RG_N in Science & Nature. Argon.
- H_RS_ in Animals. Horse.
Change the category and the answer might change too. That is the whole game in miniature.