What's That Flat?
Learn about the various types of NPL flat puzzles.
Base Types
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Altered state →
A two-letter state abbreviation is replaced by another.
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Alternade →
A word or phrase is divided into two or more others by taking alternate letters in order.
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Anagram →
A word or phrase is turned into an appropriate comment or description when its letters are rearranged.
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Beheadment →
A word or phrase becomes another when its first letter is removed.
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Change of heart →
Two words or phrases are each divided into three pieces; then their middle pieces are switched to form two others.
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Charade →
A word or phrase is broken into two or more shorter ones.
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Consonantcy →
Two or more words or phrases share the same consonants in the same order.
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Curtailment →
A word or phrase becomes another when its last letter is removed.
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Cyclegram →
Each word in the base consists of two parts. The first part is identical to the second part of the preceding word; the second part is identical to the first part of the following word.
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Deletion →
A word or phrase becomes another when an interior letter is removed.
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Double-Cross →
Two words or phrases are each divided into two pieces; then their second pieces are switched to form two others.
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Even exchange →
Two words or phrases exchange all their letters in even positions to form two new words.
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Head-to-Tail Shift →
A word or phrase becomes another when its first letter is moved to its end.
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Heart transplant →
In a heart transplant, a letter or series of letters is taken from inside one word and transplanted to another.
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Heteronym →
Two words or phrases with the same spelling are used with different pronunciations and meanings.
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Homoantonym →
Two words or phrases sound like two other words or phrases that are antonyms.
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Homonym →
Two or more unrelated words or phrases are pronounced the same but spelled differently.
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Interlock →
Two or more words or phrases are interlocked to form a longer one.
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Isomorph →
All words have the same cryptogram pattern.
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Letter bank →
One or more longer words or phrases are formed, each using all the letters in the bank at least once and as many more times as needed.
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Letter change →
A specified letter is changed to make a new word or phrase.
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Letter Shift →
A word or phrase becomes another when one letter is shifted to a new position.
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Linkade →
A word or phrase is broken into two or more shorter parts, which overlap by one letter.
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Metathesis →
A word or phrase becomes another when two letters are interchanged.
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Mutual replacement →
Two letters replace each other whenever they appear.
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Order takeout →
From a longer word, every sequence of two or more adjacent letters in consecutive alphabetical order is removed to form a shorter word.
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Pasteover →
A letter moves from its original position in a word and takes the place of another letter.
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Reversal →
A word or phrase becomes another when reversed.
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Spoonergram →
A phrase becomes another when the initial consonant sounds in its component words (or stressed syllables) are swapped.
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Terminal rotation →
A pair of words becomes another pair of words when all four terminal letters shift position.
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Transdeletion →
A word or phrase becomes another when one letter is deleted and the others are transposed.
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Transpogram →
A word or phrase becomes another when divided into two parts, which are interchanged.
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Transposal →
A word or phrase becomes another when its letters are rearranged.
Modifiers
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Bigram puzzles →
Instead of single letters, bigrams (two-letter groups) are the basic units of these puzzles.
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Italian-style →
Has no cuewords. Instead, each stanza provides clues, more or less obliquely, to one solutions word or phrase.
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Overloaded flats →
Overloaded flats are puzzles in which a cueword can stand for any of two or more solution words.
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Phonetic →
Puzzle variations in which sounds are the basic unit instead of letters.