Chemical word scrambles are an exciting new form of word puzzles. You don't need to know any chemistry! These chemical word scrambles will appeal to all word puzzle lovers, whether or not they also enjoy science. Each word is composed of symbols from the periodic table, instead of letters; but you don't need to be familiar with the periodic table to solve the word scrambles. Here is an example: The words BRaIn PoWEr are composed of the following symbols for chemical elements: B for boron, Ra for radium, In for indium, Po for polonium, W for tungsten, and Er for erbium. In chemical word scrambles, the words have been scrambled by rearranging the symbols - not the letters. Symbols that have two letters - like He for helium and Nd for neodymium - can't be split or have their letters reordered. This creates a significant distinction between ordinary word scrambles and chemical word scrambles. For example, the symbols Er, V, S, and Es may be combined to form the word SErVEs, but not the word SEVErs because symbols would have to be split to form SEVErs. One neat difference between ordinary word scrambles and chemical word scrambles is that chemical word scrambles allow us to make use of a vocabulary of longer words without effectively increasing the difficulty of the puzzle. For example, the word VErBAl is a 6-letter word, but only a 4-symbol word. When trying to rearrange the symbols Al, Er, B, and V to form the word VErBAl, there are fewer permutations to consider compared to rearranging the 6 letters A, l, e, r, b, and v to form the word verbal. We saw this as an excellent opportunity to make word scramble puzzles that involve a vocabulary of longer words. The level of difficulty of this Chemical Word Scrambles puzzle book is HARD. This book involves words that mostly have 6 to 7 symbols, and therefore 6 to 14 letters; all of the challenge words of this HARD book have 8 symbols. (There is also an EASY book with 4 to 5 symbol words, and a MEDIUM book with 6 symbols. Puzzlers who can solve harder word scrambles may want to begin with the EASY volume to get the hang of unscrambling words in terms of chemical symbols before moving onto MEDIUM or HARD.) Each puzzle features a challenge word made by rearranging the first symbol of each word. A unique feature of this book is that there is a Hints section at the back separate from the Answers section, for puzzlers who may be stuck and want to check just the first letter of the solution.
About the Author: Chris McMullen and Carolyn Kivett are a son-and-mother combination who teamed up to write a variety of word puzzle books and, recently, some children's books, such as math flash cards for the Kindle. CHRIS MCMULLEN holds a Ph.D. in theoretical high-energy physics (aka particle physics) from Oklahoma State University. He teaches physics at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. In addition to solving verbal and math puzzles, he enjoys playing chess and golf and writing books in his spare time. His mother, CAROLYN KIVETT, loves solving verbal puzzles, such as anagrams and crossword puzzles. She runs a small business in southern California where she manufactures covers for outdoor entertainment centers and golf cart enclosures from scratch. She enjoys the challenge of sewing materials into new geometric shapes, which is a three-dimensional visual puzzle. She loves to collect teddy bears and sunflowers, and also enjoys playing golf.