Hidden Meaning Word Puzzles

Hidden meaning word puzzles provide excellent development in flexible thinking skills.

The strategy for deciphering hidden meaning word puzzles is hard to describe, as much of it comes down to intuition. The best place to start is to identify any words that may be in the picture – sometimes broken into pieces. For example, in the word puzzle:

disBLESSINGguise

It is very evident that the word "blessing" has to be part of the puzzle. That leaves two groups of extraneous letters, "dis" and "guise." While "guise" is a word in and of itself, the more common word would be the combination of the two groups, "disguise."

This means, with some degree of certainty, that the words "disguise" and "blessing" are part of the solution to the puzzle. Many people will say the words out loud, in various orders and inflections, trying to see if hearing them out loud spurs any idea of the phrase hidden inside the letters.

Failing that, looking at the positions of the words in relation to each other is the next step in figuring out the puzzle. In the above example, the word BLESSING is obviously set apart from the word disguise by all caps. In addition, the letters are placed within the syllables of "disguise."

Experimenting with a few prepositions, "Blessing within disguise," "blessing inside of disguise," we can find the solution, the common phrase "blessing in disguise."

That is, usually, what you are searching for: a common phrase or famous quote. The above example is a very basic example; some word puzzles are hidden in a much more tricky way. For example:

SHALLCOME

This is a tricky word puzzle because it relies on a synonym for a quality of one of the words, and uses it as a pun. The words in the puzzle are obvious, "shall" and "come." Veterans of other word puzzles would easily figure out that the placement of "shall" above the word "come" turns it into "…shall overcome." However, it might take a bit longer to realize that the diminutive size of the word "shall" indicates the word "wee," creating the pun in the phrase: "Wee shall overcome."

If someone were not familiar with the history behind the phrase, it would be quite a while before the phrase actually made sense. This is one of the challenges of creating hidden word puzzles; you must make the phrase common enough that most of your audience will know of it, but difficult enough to provide more than a few seconds of entertainment.

Often words and letters will be placed in a particular manner in and of themselves, not in relation to each other. For example, the following puzzle contains two separate phrases, one for each word, that together make up a four-word phrase:

T    I    M    Eabcde

The first is obviously a word, "TIME," but the second is a bit more complex: not a word at all, but a series of letters, one crossed out. Taking them in order, describing the qualities of the first yields several possibilities for common phrases: "time stretches," "long time," and "big time" just to name a few.

Setting those possibilities aside, you would then look at the second part. The letter that is crossed out is "c," which is a homonym for a couple of words ("see" and "sea") which makes it likely that one of those words will fit. Noting that out of all the words, it is the one that is crossed out leaves the idea of "no C" or, to use the words, "no see."

That fits with the second option for the first word, giving you "long time no see."

Many collections of word play puzzles are found on the Internet, ranging from pure letter-based puzzles at KidPrintables to more graphically-oriented puzzles at WordJuxtapoz. The latter site also has many other kinds of puzzles that can both entertain and expand the minds of kids and adults alike.

 

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