This week’s puzzle was word based, as follows.
The challenge was to find the longest word that can be reduced, one letter at a time, all the way down to a one-letter word. Every time you remove a letter you can rearrange the remaining letters, if you wish to, but the letters must form a valid English word at every stage.
A simple example being:
OVER – lose the V to leave OER and rearrange to form
ORE – lose the E to leave OR and no rearrangement is needed
OR – lose the R to leave O and no rearrangement is needed
O
You can remove letters from anywhere in the word, not just from the beginning or the end.
We have to confess we were reminded of this puzzle by one of the questions on Only Connect, and our first word is Creepiest (nine letters) and we like this because the letters are rearranged at every stage.
We also found a 13-letter word Tetranitrides, which goes
And that's where we stopped, but someone supplied the following 14-letter word.
TONIC
INTO
TIN
IN
I