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 up to $50.
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 now 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 (I've run out of anagram-based pseudonyms), 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).
The value of the Grandmaster Puzzles gift card will start at $50, 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 to $0.) A matching amount will also be donated to the Food Bank of West Central Texas, so 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 four guesses for you, chosen from among the guesses that were made in Let's Guess Three Words II!:
The set of all words where the fourth letter is a vowel (A, E, I, O, U, or Y): NONE
The set of all words containing a doubled consonant (BB, CC, DD, FF, . . . XX, ZZ): ONE
The set of all words in which the 3rd and 5th letters both exist and are a vowel (A, E, I, O, U, or Y) and a consonant (any letter besides A, E, I, O, U, or Y) in some order: TWO
The set of all words that begin with and end with a consonant (anything besides A, E, I, O, U, or Y): ALL
Good luck, and yappy guessing!
