Vivant Bong

By The Mystery League • Issue #23 • View online

It’s data science week on the Dispatch!

Puzzle of the Week: Think of a two-word English phrase that’s been anglicized from its French origins. Reverse the order of the words, add a letter to the end, and you’ll get a new two-word phrase that might describe a French person’s taste in food.

Exploration of NYT Crossword answers from 1994-2017

Jonathan Tan has analyzed 20 years of New York Times crosswords and mapped out how the puzzle has changed w/r/t answer length and word density. It’s not a surprising result, but it’s a really fun read, with a lovely set of charts.

github.com • Share

The NYT crossword puzzle is approximately as cool as the OED

More NYT crossword data analysis, this time comparing words to the OED. Fun to see which words got in the dictionary first, and which in the crossword first.

blog.nycdatascience.com • Share

Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words

Graphs of each of the 26 letters and the frequency of their position in English words. Read to the end to find the most representative word in English.

www.prooffreader.com • Share

Solution to previous puzzle

BEPURFGEN = PNEG + UBEFR
From Issue #22. Decrypt at rot13.com.

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By The Mystery League

We are a company of creative puzzlemakers in Chicago. This is our weekly dispatch of puzzle news. To learn about puzzle events in Chicago, subscribe to Puzzling in Chicago: http://mysteryleague.com/pic.

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