Case 37 · wordplay / segmentation · Hard · About 10–15 minutes
A signwriter has joined six labels into one continuous inscription. The original labels survive in a supply list, but all their boundaries have vanished. Short words inside longer words make the restoration less obvious than it first appears.
You must recover the labels themselves. There is no second hidden message and no need to turn the inscription into a grammatical sentence.
The supply list contains exactly these six labels:
STAR · START · ART · ARTS · TAR · TART
Each label was used once, in some order, with no alteration. The writer then removed the spaces. The complete inscription reads:
TARTSTARSTARTARTARTSTAR
Restore five boundaries so that the result contains all six supplied labels exactly once. Give the labels in their recovered order.
A boundary can occur only between letters. You may not read backward, overlap labels, discard a character, or introduce a word outside the supply list. Two labels may share letters in their spellings, but they cannot share a physical character position in the inscription.
It may help to put six small checkboxes beside the supply list. Crossing out a used label keeps a seemingly promising partial reading from quietly using the same label twice.
Hint 1 - reveal when you want a nudge
At the beginning, TAR is a possible prefix, but it leaves the next unconsumed character as T. Test what label could start there rather than accepting the first prefix you see.
Hint 2 - reveal when you want a nudge
Starting with TART leaves STARSTARTARTARTSTAR. After choosing STAR next, keep START available as its own separate label, not as permission to reuse STAR.
Reveal the solution and explanation
The unique restoration is TART | STAR | START | ART | ARTS | TAR.
Putting these six labels together recreates TARTSTARSTARTARTARTSTAR exactly. Each supplied label appears once, and the boundaries divide rather than overlap the characters.
A successful reconstruction alone does not prove there are no alternatives. For that check, the six distinct labels can be arranged in 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 720 orders. Comparing the concatenation of every order with the printed inscription leaves exactly the order above. This enumeration uses only the supplied strings and the stated once-only rule.
A hand solution can use the same principle without writing out 720 rows. At each boundary, try only unused labels that match the next letters exactly. Abandon a branch as soon as no unused label matches. Continue until every character has been consumed and every label crossed out.
The supply list is important. Without its fixed membership and usage counts, words such as STAR and START would invite arbitrary alternative segmentations. The puzzle’s answer is a constrained reconstruction, not a judgment about which phrase sounds nicest.
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