Can you find the English word that meets all of the following criteria?
- six letters long (non-hyphenated)
- four unique vowels
- two unique consonants
- starts and ends in a vowel
- when you remove the vowels, you see through them
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Sign up to join this communityCan you find the English word that meets all of the following criteria?
Based on the word list in Laurel's answer, my answer is:
opaque.
Because, when you remove the vowels, you have:
pq, which resembles a pair of glasses, thus meeting the see through criteria.
Not sure about seeing through them, but removing vowels from
OUTVIE
... leaves you something you can look at ...
Well, now that there is no no-computers, I hacked together some code. I used /usr/share/dict/words
as my dictionary. We know that it starts and ends with a vowel, is six letters long, and all the letters are different, so the word must match this regex:
^([aeiou])(?!\1)(.)(?!\1)(?!\2)(.)(?!\1)(?!\2)(?!\3)(.)(?!\1)(?!\2)(?!\3)(?!\4)(.)(?!\1)(?!\2)(?!\3)(?!\4)(?!\5)[aeiou]$
We know it must have 4 vowels, which means it will also match this regex:
([aeiou].*?[aeiou].*?[aeiou].*?[aeiou])
This got me this list:
acoine
aerugo
agouti
ailuro
alpieu
apiole
apiose
apoise
aquose
areito
arigue
ariose
arouse
asideu
audile
augite
aumrie
auntie
auride
aurite
embuia
epizoa
iodate
ipomea
obelia
ogaire
opaque
opiate
oturia
outage
outawe
outlie
outsea
outvie
uniate
ureido
uremia
utopia
The last clue ("when you remove the vowels, you see through them") isn't as easily cracked. I have some guesses:
outsea -> "sea" is through when you remove the vowels
uremia -> remove vowels to get rm
utopia -> remove vowels to get "tp" or toilet paper. The promise of utopia is replaced by something you flush away
Surely there are many such words? But one example is
GUINEA.