Ahoy, Fellow Cruciverbalists! Welcome to Week 11 of my crossword contest. If you’re new to the contest and would like to enter, please see the site FAQ on the left sidebar for instructions.
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
45 solvers correctly took five Olympic events from the formerly used Wade-Giles transliteration of China’s capital city (Peking) to the modern Pinyin version (Beijing). This meant changing a “P” sound to a “B” or a “K” sound to a “J,” so “field hockey” became FIELD HAJI, “triple jump” became TRIBBLE JUMP, “pole vault” became BOWL VAULT, “water polo” became WATER BOLO, and “basketball” became the rather fishy BASS JET BALL.
[UPDATE, 8/17 — Jon Delfin writes to remind me that it might be nice to mention what last week’s contest answer word was. D’oh! The contest instructions asked for the only grid entry that contained all four consonants relevant to the theme, which were, as explained above, P, B, K, and J. The only grid entry containing all four of those was PUB JOKE at 1-down, which was last week’s contest answer.]
Last week’s lucky winner, chosen randomly from the 45 correct entries received, is Jan O‘– just kidding. The winner is Jeffrey Harris of Nashville, Tenn. Jeffrey has opted to receive a copy of Golf Crosswords as his prize.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest is a crossword variant. Hey, get back here!
The variant is called “kaidoku,” which is a word I made up (well, not quite; see here for entertaining backstory). You may also know these as “alphacodes” or “coded crosswords” and they work like this: each letter of the alphabet is represented by a number in this grid. Use letter frequency, pattern recognition, and whatever other codebreaking tools you can conjure up to fill the grid with uncapitalized, non-hyphenated (!) dictionary words. You won’t find anything like LONG-LOST or STOCKHOLM in here, but note that you might find something like AFGHAN or JOEY, since those words have uncapitalized dictionary meanings in addition to their use as proper nouns.
I wrote a book of these in 2006 (test-solved by some kid whose name I forget). Thus far, not a single winner of MGWCC has chosen this mighty tome as their prize. I won’t force next week’s winner to choose the Kaidoku book, but…come on, do me a solid!
Anyway, this week’s contest answer is a six-letter word comprised of the letters represented by 3, 9, 11, 18 ,19, and 24 in this week’s Kaidoku. E-mail it to me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com by Tuesday at noon ET to win your prize!
To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. No Across Lite this week b/c it doesn’t support this format.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.