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Check this out:

Celestial Sleepwalker


Okay, it might be more impressive if I show you what is moving along the arrows:

Celestial Sleepwalker (filled in)


At every vertex in a long word.

Flowing in to every vertex are two short words ("inputs"). Anagrammed together, these two short words yield the long word.

Flowing out of every vertex are two short words ("outputs"). Anagrammed together, these two short words also yield the long word.


Now it's your turn to create one. Look, I've made it easy for you by filling in the first word:

Celestial Puzzle


Follow these guidelines to create an aesthetically pleasing star:
1. Short words must be four letters or more. (So no I, A, DO, AM, ON, AND, etc.)
2. Short words may not appear within the long word without rearrangement. (So SPACEWALKING cannot be composed or decomposed into SPACE and WALKING.)
3. All words should be fairly well-known. (So no need to reach for the dictionary.)



Addendum:

I sense that this puzzle is too difficult to do by hand. Below, I present the broad outlines of the solution, as well as a much easier and more fun follow-on puzzle. That is probably the puzzle I should have posed!

Here are the long words at the vertices, going counterclockwise around the compass points:

N: VIDEOCAMERAS

NW: FOODSERVICE

W: WORKFORCES

SW: CAMERAWORK

S: VIDEOCAMERA

SE: FOODSERVICE

E: WORKFORCE

NE: CAMERAWORK


Now, can you fill in the short words which must travel along the arrows?

(Hint: None of the short words are CAMERA or WORK.)

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  • $\begingroup$ "Videocameras" isn't a singular word anywhere I've seen it. Do the other words play fast and loose in this way? $\endgroup$
    – scatter
    Jun 10, 2019 at 19:08
  • $\begingroup$ Can the longwords be identic? IIRC, on the example, the left and the right nodes are same: SLEEPWALKING. $\endgroup$
    – athin
    Jun 10, 2019 at 19:10
  • $\begingroup$ @Christian — Hmm, I always worry that uncertainties like this will arise, which is why I maintain a very clean and unambiguous word list (no hyphenated words, no apostrophed words, no accented words, etc.). That said, I have always known "videocamera" as one word, my third-party word list also has it as one word, and even my voice recognition software has it as a single word. However, when I Google it, I see what you're saying — it is now almost ubiquitous as two words. $\endgroup$
    – SlowMagic
    Jun 11, 2019 at 0:43
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    $\begingroup$ FYI, all the other solution words are also compound words. I researched each of them in turn. Only one of them raised questions such as "Is this one word or two words?" And the answer seems to be "can be either". $\endgroup$
    – SlowMagic
    Jun 11, 2019 at 0:43
  • $\begingroup$ @athin — Yes, just as my example has two polar pairs of identical words, the puzzle solution also has two polar pairs of identical words. But the arrangements are not the same. (I.e., in the example, the two polar pairs are next to each other. In the puzzle solution, the two polar pairs are not next to each other.) $\endgroup$
    – SlowMagic
    Jun 11, 2019 at 0:44

1 Answer 1

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Based on SlowMagic's answer I have managed to fill in the rest of the diagram

enter image description here

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