A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama Quiz

Answer: Palindrome

British writer Leigh Mercer crafted the palindrome "A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama" in 1948, one of the more famous of his many word plays. In addition to being a palindrome - a word or sentence that reads the same backward as forward -this phrase also succinctly captures the efforts of "A Man" (Teddy Roosevelt) and his convoluted "Plan" to build the Panama Canal.

Answer: Missing Letters

"Znzbr" is "Zanzibar" with all the vowels missing. Missing letter questions are familiar to crossword puzzle players. Zanzibar is an island archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa which united with Tanganyika in 1964 to create the country of Tanzania.

Answer: Fractured Word

A word is "fractured" when it is expressed in other words that when pronounced together sound like the base word. Pronouncing "deep rush yon" together hopefully yields the base word "depression".

Answer: Logic Puzzle

Logic puzzles typically begin by setting up premises such as "Ben doesn't like chocolate", "Amy chose her dessert before Ben", etc. Given these premises a grid of relationships can be constructed and other relationships deduced. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) authored many logic puzzles in the late 1800s, as well as "Alice in Wonderland" and other works that themselves contained logic puzzles.

Answer: Riddle

Riddles are questions or statements that require some clever thinking to resolve. They are typically enigmatic: mysterious, difficult to understand. Riddles have been popular in western culture since at least the 15th century, and ancient examples exist such as the Riddle of the Sphinx or Samson's Riddle. The answer to the simple riddle here is "t".

Answer: In Other Words

In Other Words requires replacing the given phrase with synonyms to obtain the answer, usually a better known expression. In this example, "Unlit Equus" becomes "dark horse".

Answer: Wordwise

"Say what you see" is the typical clue for a Wordwise question, in this case the word "mother" in inside the word "law", for "mother in law".

Answer: Before and After

The answer is a word that follows the first to form a phrase, and begins the second to form another phrase, in this case "ship" results in "Pirate ship" and "Ship shape".

Answer: Anagram

Cryptics are puzzles, and the questions often have clues about how to solve them. For example, "mixed" means the answer is an anagram ("three" in my example); "initially" means the answer is formed from the first letters of the following clue, etc.

Answer: Hidden word

Hidden in the given words or sentence is another word, either part of one word or consecutive letters in adjacent words. If the question states the number of letters in the answer, all the better to work through the given words looking for words of that number.