New Word Operation •• Some Blog Site

New Word Operation

Jan

2024

I happened to be reading the back of the cereal box during a recent breakfast, and it had some activities to try.

image of the back of a Cheerios box with activities

So I tried them, and I was particularly disappointed with the word challenge. Here is the challenge. You try it and see what you think.

image of the crunch time word challenge on the back of the cereal box

Here are the base words: spoon, cloth, milk, light, break, wash, berry, table, straw, star, blue, cloth, man, fast.

And they want to know how many words you can crunch together to make a new word.

My answer: 14, but that uses each base word only once. My new word is lightmilkclothbreakwashberrytablestrawstarbluefastclothman. It sounds like a superhero of some sort. And it reminds me of some German words.

They did give a hint that some words may be used more than once. I think they didn’t notice they put cloth in there twice. And if I can repeat words, then the answer to how many words I can crunch together to make a new word is “infinite”.

But I think that’s not what they meant. They’re looking for compound words, with just two halves. So the question should have been “How many new compound words can you make by crunching together these words?”

In that case, my answer is 149. That’s with 13 total words (I removed the duplicate “cloth” because it wouldn’t make any unique combinations), so each word can make 12 compound words when combined with the 12 other words. Do that 13 times, and you get 156 total words.

Then I added one more because I can make “clothcloth” as a new compound word. So up to 157.

Then I have to remove existing words, because the question was how many new words I can make. So there were 8 existing words like strawberry and breakfast, that brings the 157 down to 149.

Let’s see what the cereal box says the answer is.

image of the crunch the numbers challenge on the back of the cereal box