Contest: Let's Guess Three Words IV!

New rules are in bold! Read them carefully!

I am thinking of three distinct English words that are at least 2 letters long and no more than 15 letters long. All of the words are valid in Scrabble according to https://scrabble.merriam.com/. Your goal is to guess them. Everyone who guesses the trio of words correctly by the time the contest is over will be entered for a chance to win a gift card for Grandmaster Puzzles worth $10 (its value is no longer tied to the charity money pool), plus a surprise gift featuring a fox/badger character that veterans of this blog might remember (same surprise as in my last contest — I don't wish to spoil the surprise, but I've got dozens). Additionally, one random person who meaningfully participates in this contest (either by making a public guess at any time or by correctly guessing the word trio) will win the same prize package in a second random drawing! Now you don't even need to solve anything to win, just help people solve something! This is truly remarkable!

Once per week, each and every single person reading this blog post is allowed to e-mail a set of words to glmathgrant[at]gmail[dot]com. To give me more time to prepare the weekly posts (in case of a freak statewide power outage, for example), the deadline to guarantee your guess being accepted is 12:01 AM Central time each Sunday. If it is a set of at least 10 words or it is defined by a property of the words rather than an explicit list, I will publicly post on this blog (on the following Monday at 12:01 AM Central time) whether NONE, ONE, TWO, or ALL of my words are in that set. If it is a set of 9 words or fewer and you list the words explicitly (that is, you guess "{CINQ, QADI, QAID, QATS, QOPH}" rather than "the set of all Scrabble-legal 4-letter words with a Q and not a U"), I will privately give you the same information in an email sometime that Sunday.

I reserve the right to reject any guess if it is impossible for the average reader (who doesn't know what my words are already) to determine whether or not any given word is in your set within a relatively short amount of time. This is a difficult quality to define empirically, but valid guesses would include "the set of all words starting with a letter in the word PRIME" or "the set of all words with a prime number of distinct letters", and invalid guesses would include "the set of the three words Grant is thinking of" and "the set of all words still in at least one possible word trio given the information publicly available right now, and which, if the words in that set were listed and numbered alphabetically starting from 1, would have prime indices". Keep it simple!

Once someone has guessed the trio of words (that is, submitted to me a set of exactly three words and gotten a result of ALL), one last weekly update will be posted on this blog, including one last hint from me, and then people who haven't guessed the words yet will have one more week to try to do so and be entered in the prize drawing. The deadline for this final week will be 12:01 AM Central time on the following Monday (that is, the aforementioned 12:01 AM Sunday deadline will not be applied). The rules for private guesses still apply (you must explicitly list the three words you are guessing, not define them uniquely by some convoluted property).

This contest will also benefit the Food Bank of West Central Texas. The money pool will start at $80, the amount determined by the previous contest, and then go down $2 for every weekly update that has gone by without someone guessing the trio of words. (Exception: the value cannot go below $2.) Up to $50 of the money pool will be donated once the words are guessed. If there's any money left over, it will carry over to another word-guessing contest one week after the results of this contest are announced. Even if you aren't interested in the prize drawing, your participation may help someone else solve the words faster and thus help charity!

To kick things off, I'll make two guesses for you (not four, because you people are getting smarter!), chosen from among the guesses that were made in Let's Guess Three Words III!. Note: Unless otherwise specified, "vowel" and "consonant" are defined as per National Puzzlers League rules, since those are the rules my readers seem to want to go along with. This means that A, E, I, O, U, and Y are vowels, and the other 20 letters are consonants.

The set of all words in which the second letter is a vowel: ONE
The set of all words containing a string of three or more consecutive consonants (e.g. THREE) and/or a string of two or more consecutive vowels (e.g. THREE): TWO

Good luck, and happy guessing!

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