New tag for "My 1,2,3,4 are..." genre?

Question

By now you've probably seen questions like this:

My first through fourth are a test. My third through seventh are enough. What am I?

with the answer being

EXAMPLE, since letters 1 through 4 are EXAM and letters 3 through 7 are AMPLE.

The idea is that each clue describes a substring of the solution, and placing the clue answers together in the specified way gives an answer word or phrase.

Now, I noticed that we have several of these types of puzzle:

• Seven letter word : it goes on

• Another seven letter word

• Seven letter word : the last one?

• A 10-letter word puzzle - what am I?

• Guess the 9 letter word

• A seven letter word denoting a woman

• I'm an 11 letter word - what am I?

• Another 11-letter word puzzle - what am I?

(and those aren't all!)

I think it's enough to make a tag for this genre. It's certainly common, usually decent quality, and fairly well-liked. But as far as I know, there's no "official" name for them - at least, not one widely used.

So, my question to you is: What should we call these?

I can think of several options: word-assembly, word-division, letter-placement, and word-extraction are the first that come to mind. I'd like to get input from the community, though. Do you have a succinct yet descriptive way to reference these puzzles?

Answer 1

word-assembly. I think that that's the most logical - you have to assemble the word.

Answer 2

Yeah, seem to be more puzzles like this nowadays.

I like the word-extraction or assembly.

Answer 3

Will Shortz wrote some articles for Word Ways, about the history of word puzzles. Pertinent here is "British Word Puzzles (1800-1850)", Word Ways Vol. 6 (1973), Issue 4, p.214. If you put this key string into your search engine: british word puzzles 1800-1850 william f shortz then that should bring up some links to online copies of it. On that article's 3rd page, Shortz describes the logogriph, which was exactly the sort of puzzle we're discussing here.

The only other versified puzzle that was in vogue during the early 1800s was the logogriph. In this puzzle, the keyword was enigmatically expressed, and then clues were given to other words which were composed of letters contained in the keyword. Thus, one logogriph appeared in The Masquerade on the word "spear", which contains the letters which form ape, spar, reap, asp, ear, rap, par, pear, pare, are, as, sap, rasp, sea, pea, spa and spare. Logogriphs tended to be inordinately long, as clues had to be given to each word contained in the keyword.

But, really, who'd use logogriph to seek them here?

Answer 4

I'm voting for letter-placement or word-extraction!

Answer 5

Hmm, would marsupial-words be approbriate ? link

But then again, if nobody knows what it means, nobody would use it... ;c)

Answer 6

How about charade? Admittedly in word puzzles that are called charades, the elements that are put together are longer than individual letters. Still, people seeking word-puzzles are likely to know the word "charade". If there were a different term specifically for the letter-unit charade, for one thing it might be so obscure nobody would use it, and for another thing it might be splitting hairs to introduce two tags for these two varieties of word-puzzle.