Enigmarch 2025, Day 8: QUARTER

[tahnan]

Mostly just had to get past a mental block on this one.

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No Quarter Given

With a high number of unusual letter pairs, it shouldn't be too hard to reassemble the following quarters into words. (If you need clues for the words, they're listed alphabetically at the end.) The answer is two words.

1. AA, DE, LU


2. GH, NI, TJ


3. EL, ST, SV


4. GU, MD, PS


5. BO, NT, UF


6. HB, OY, UG


7. CO, OQ, UY


8. CZ, IT, ZA


9. EY, PU, RV


10. BW, CO, EB


11. BO, BW, HI

Clues: Bird - Candy - Different bird - Drug - Gossamer - Hairdo - Meeting - Ruler - Soldier - Thinnest - Vendor

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An/sw/er ch/ec/ki/ng he/re.

Comments

[yomikoma]

Nice job on finding words with ridiculous bigrams :)

[tahnan]

Sorted my list of words two ways: by frequency of least frequent bigram (among the words, not in the language overall), and by total frequency of all bigrams. Looked at the lowest twenty from both lists, picked something I liked. :-)

It did mean not using "2024 erotic thriller" for #10, but you can't have everything.

[cnoocy]

I like the clue phrase a lot!

[tahnan]

Weirdly the clue phrase was the absolute hardest part of this puzzle. I went through a lot of "hung drawn and quartered" variations I didn't like (and that had an odd number of letters), and a lot of attempts to clue THIRD as the amendment that includes the word "quartered", and...yeah. No. So I'm glad it worked.