Breakout is a weekly editorial word puzzle of political and social commentary on current affairs. The punch line is delivered to the puzzle solver when he or she discovers the answer word or phrase. Breakout, "the word puzzle with an attitude,"™ is updated on Monday.
You may be more familiar with an editorial cartoon. An editorial cartoon uses a drawing to make political or social comments on current affairs.
An egram (pronounced EE-gram or eg-GRAM) of a given word or phrase is another meaningful word or phrase that is formed from the given one by selecting letters from it while keeping the original order of the letters in the given. For example, "LIARS" is an egram of "LegIslAtoRS." Mathematically speaking an egram is a combination. The word "egram" comes from the Greek "e-" meaning "out of" or "from" (as in "eject" or "egress") and "gramma" meaning "letter."
In my Breakout™ puzzle the given word or phrase is a clue to the answer egrammatic word or phrase that it contains. The puzzle solver selects letters from the given word or phrase, keeping their original order, to correctly fill in the blank answer spaces. Some given and answer word or phrase pairs are mathematically too difficult to solve in a reasonable time. By providing additional clues such as whether a particular answer letter is a consonant or vowel, or giving away some of the answer letters, the mathematical difficulty is reduced to a reasonable level.
You may be more familiar with an anagram. An anagram is a reordering of the letters of a given word or phrase to produce another meaningful word or phrase. For example, "left" is an anagram of "felt." Mathematically speaking an anagram is a permutation. The word "anagram" comes from the Greek "ana-" meaning "back" and "gramma" meaning "letter."
In an anagrammatic puzzle, such as the Jumble® puzzle (created by Henri Arnold and Mike Argirion and distributed by Tribune Media Services) the solver finds the correct reordering of the given "jumbled" letters to form the answer word or phrase. In Jumble the given ordering of the letters is usually meaningless.
All Breakout™ puzzles on this Web site are the work of Diane Demers (felicity@sdf.lonestar.org) and are copyrighted (©) material. All rights are reserved. The Breakout™ name and logo are trademarks (™) owned by Diane Demers.