Case 31 · wordplay · Easy · About 5–8 minutes
The night archivist has left five long labels on the desk and five short labels in a tray. Her note says that a label can lose a letter without losing its place in the collection. The missing letters have a second job.
You need one five-letter password. The illustration establishes the setting, but nothing in its cards or furnishings is a clue.
Match each long label to a different short label. Delete exactly one letter from the long label to obtain its partner. Keep the remaining letters in their original order: rearrangement, substitution, and pronunciation tricks are forbidden.
The long labels, in the order you must use, are:
- THREAT
- COAST
- PLANT
- CLAMP
- CHART
The tray contains CART, PLAN, TREAT, LAMP, COST. Use each tray label exactly once.
Write down the letter deleted from each long label. Read those five letters from the first numbered row to the last. What password does the archivist want?
Work only with the supplied spellings. You do not need to find additional words in a dictionary, decide whether an unusual abbreviation counts, or infer an ordering from word meanings.
Hint 1 - reveal when you want a nudge
The short-label tray is a closed set. Try each available short label against THREAT while preserving letter order.
Hint 2 - reveal when you want a nudge
THREAT becomes TREAT when H is removed. Keep H, rather than a letter from the surviving word, as the first password character.
Reveal the solution and explanation
The password is HATCH.
| Long label | Short partner | Deleted letter |
|---|---|---|
| THREAT | TREAT | H |
| COAST | COST | A |
| PLANT | PLAN | T |
| CLAMP | LAMP | C |
| CHART | CART | H |
The numbered list supplies the reading order, so sorting the tray alphabetically would change the intended operation. The unused order of the tray is merely how its contents were listed.
There is no choice between two valid matching arrangements. Comparing every one-letter deletion of each long label with the five supplied short labels gives exactly the partner shown in that row. Once a partner is fixed, the deleted character is fixed too. Even the repeated H is legitimate: the rule forbids reusing a tray label, not repeating a password letter.
A final forward check is useful. Insert the recorded character back into its original position in each short label. All five original long labels return without any other change. The result therefore satisfies both the matching rule and the extraction rule.
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