This week's challenge comes from Sudipta Das, a young computer student in Calcutta, India.
Think of a familiar 9-letter word, in which the first letter immediately follows the 9th in the alphabet. The 2nd letter immediately follows the 8th in the alphabet. The 3rd immediately follows the 7th, and the 4th immediately follows the 6th.
For example: SPECTATOR (S follows R, and P follows O). Unfortunately, the pattern breaks down with the remaining letters.
Hint: The word is used most often in the TV and film industry.
What word is it?
-- WESun Challenge, 2002-10-20
SPECtATOR
1234.6789 Their
numbering
0123.5678
Perl
numbering
Two other shorter examples found by my Perl script ...
THONGS (6)
BETheSDA (8)
Turns out, the answer is not unique. But hard to find, we must use the right dictionary. Plenty of things in 'Spectator' class m=2,
$ perl -s wesun20021020.pl -count=2 -fn=/usr/dict/words -length=6
$ perl -s wesun20021020.pl -count=2 -fn=/usr/dict/web2 -length=9
but none of m=3, let alone the desired m=4 in commonest dictionaries; in my copy of /usr/dict/words, -count=3 -length=7 finds only 1 word, which makes finding the winner -count=4 -length=9 is hard :
35985 7 <<tumults>> 20 21 13 21 12 20 19 [0:6 t/20,s/19 ][1:5 u/21,t/20 ][2:4 m/13,l/12 ]
-- even Webster's 2nd didn't find it. But
$ perl -s wesun20021020.pl -count=3 -fn=/usr/dict/enable1.txt -length=6
finds the right answer, and one other; one of these would be found for -count=4, as requested, even.
Uri and Ron and someone else recognized that the statement quoted from the Puzzle site requies 4 pairs, not just 3.