The word “facetious” is one of my favorite words. It contains all of the vowels, in alphabetic order. If you make it an adverb (“facetiously”) then you get the sometimes-vowel “y” to boot. I believe that only “abstemiously” and “adventitiously” meet these same criteria, and a puzzle strictly about these words would be easily solved with a quick Google search. Are there many words that have 4 of the vowels (including “y”) in alphabetic order, and can they be put together as clues? The answer is a resounding “yes.”
Below, please find clues that will lead you the answers to this week’s puzzle. Note that “adventitiously,” above, has duplicate “i”s, and for the purposes of this puzzle, a second or third instance of a vowel can be out of order, and other non-ordered vowels are acceptable. That is, words like “impiously”(iouy) and “gelatinously”(iouy) are valid.
Submit your correct answers to as many of the below as you can by end of day Friday to GeekDad Central and you might just win this week’s $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate.
Sample:
Mutinous royalty (eiou, iouy) – Rebellious viscountcy
- A go-getter of a redundant shortening of a word into letters. (iouy, eiou, aeio)
- An evil, beginning set of chord notes played in sequence. (eiou, iouy, aeio)
- A loving, tasty literary endnote. (aeio, eiou, eiou)
- A somber, spiritual man with a puppet on his knee. (eiou, eiou, eiou)
- No more paracetamol. (aeio, aeio)
- To bring back tasty hostility. (eiou, eiou, aeio)
- Flogging some taraxacum (aeio, aeio)
- A mirrored cylinder displaying diodes and transistors (eiou, aeio)
Good luck, and I look forward to a lot of inventive solutions being sent!
