Google Puzzle Challenge 6/30/2206

For this puzzle, we had to make words that were combinations of four letter synomyn of a list of words.

There was a hint on the page that I used. You can figure out which words make up each pair by dragging them on the page until they turn green.

First, I wrote a quick two line shell script to dump the web page from thesaurus.com for each of the words on the list into a separate file (in plain text format). I had to manually enter the four letter chessmen because chessman isn't in the thesaurus.

Next, I got a list of all the eight letter words (there are 39280 of them) from the YAWL list.

Finally, I wrote a TCL script that grabbed all of the four letter synonyms for each word from the files that I downloaded, tries combining them in all possible ways, and printing them out if it found them in the eight letter word list. The script runs in about four seconds on my computer. I sorted the output of the program and manually looked up each word pair (which were already determined by the hint) in the output.

I was able to determine all but three of the answers this way. I didn't find these answers because the following synonyms weren't in the thesaurus:

pome = pear

placed = lain

innate = born

Here's a screen shot of the answers. There's a bug in the puzzle so two of the answers are by the wrong words.