“Startling” is a word from which you can subtract one letter at a time, and with each subtraction you create another word. Can you figure out each word in the series? Drag the slider down to reveal the words one at a time.
The Startling Puzzle is one version of the Nine Letters Puzzle. Here are a few more.
These puzzles are examples of what Dmitri Borgmann called “word surgery.” His book Language on Vacation contains several more types. One variation is to allow the letters to be rearranged after one letter is removed.
In these examples, at each step, a letter is removed from both the front and back of the word, and then the remaining letters are reversed.
Do you have other examples of these kinds of puzzles? Please share them in the comments below.