Solution: Letters from the Expedition
Answer: DON JUAN
Written by Abigail Caron, Ian Osborn, and Jakob Weisblat
This is a puzzle about characters (letters) that look like English letters but are not.
The clues are essentially the wordplay part of cryptic crossword clues, where the (unwritten) definition for each is "a letter". This is a table of their solutions.
| Enumeration | Clue | Answer (Written Out) | Answer | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (3) | In the middle of something. | ETH | ᴆ | somETHing |
| (5) | After-school assignment was a breeze. | HWAIR | 𐍈 | HomeWork + AIR |
| (6) | The University of Toronto was founded in North American high school. | NAUTHS | 𐌽 | North American (U of T) High School |
| (5,3) | Chobani loses its spiritual leader without you. | GREEK YOT | Ϳ | GREEK YOgurT (remove GURU without U) |
| (2,3) | That african fly is not small. | TE TSE | Ҵ | TSE TSE - S |
| (8) | Brooding feeling leads to the sound of sweet alcohol. | ANGSTROM | Å | ANGST + RUM |
| (5) | I was left out of the puzzle. | ENGMA | Ŋ | ENIGMA - I |
Author’s Notes
While stuck on this year's Mystery Hunt puzzle "Unpleasant Characters", we compiled a list of characters that look like English letters. This was unfortunately utterly unhelpful for solving that puzzle - but did directly lead to the creation of this one! The idea of using cryptic-style clues without definitions to clue a set of related strange-looking words was at least partially inspired by "Deep Blue," also from this year's Mystery Hunt.