Enigmarch 2026, Day 9: WATER

[tahnan]

Not my best clue phrase (and honestly there was a better choice available for the prompt), but here we are.

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Arroyos

The answer is four letters.

1. Pierre is so rich, it seems like he owns a houvery city in France. (1)
2. Niasony often helps out at her church when the deaes on vacation. (3)
3. Ekaterin keeps bees that polte the flowers she grows. (2)
4. Paulo declared his home a "No Dre" after one too many screaming fights. (1)
5. Sarah is such a prude that when she saw Michelangelo's David, she tried to cover hidness. (4)
6. Marlon hates how the oil srs everywhere when he fries chicken. (6)
7. Marie likes to be frank, but finds people often take hesty as rudeness. (1)
8. Rajesh hopes to disrupt the music try with his self-playing guitar. (5)
9. Whenever Jean-Claude travels to Dublin, he murmurs "Helland" when the plane lands. (4)
10. Francesca bought a tramline to see if she could do backflips. (2)
11. Ahmed invested in NFTs and was left penss when the bubble burst. (3)
12. Nigel arrived at Parliament wisage from the King. (5)

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An earlier version of this puzzle misspelled "Helland". The error has been corrected.

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Take me to the answer checker, dip me in the water, washing me down, washing me down

Comments

[yomikoma]

Is there a typo in #2?

[tahnan]

#2, or #3? There's definitely an error in #3, which I'm about to fix.

[lorelei]

This was quick and fun. I had to look to look up the answer, but in context it was not too hard to interpret.

I do think there is a missing letter in #9 (Heland), and in #3 I think polte is misspelled? Also I was confused by #7 for a while but that was all me.
Having two letters wrong made a mess of the clue phrase, the correct one is much better.

[tahnan]

I had "Helland", looked at it, and said, "No, I only want to keep one of the two Ls!"...forgetting there were three of them.

On #3, I can assure you that Merriam-Webster (and, more relevantly, the wordlist I was using, and not thinking very hard about) recognizes it as an alternate spelling.