WORD WHEEL

YOU have ten minutes to find as many words as possible using the letters in the wheel. Each word must use the hub letter and at least three others, and letters may be used only once. You cannot use plurals, foreign words or proper nouns, but verb forms ending in ‘s’ are permitted. There is one nine-letter word in the wheel, for which today’s clue is: Taking in key with broken old hinge. How you rate: 8 words, average; 12, good; 16, very good; 18 or more, excellent. Solution tomorrow. Yesterday’s words: elusion, ensoul, heinous, heinously, house, ileus, lieu, louse, lousy, lune, lush, nous, onus, ousel, shun, slue, soul, unholy.

MINDBENDER

1. Four friends are studying the bar bill after a big meal. Kat ran up £6 more than a quarter of the total; Seb’s share is £3 more than one-eighth of the total; Bridget has to put in half as much as Seb, and Rhiannon’s share is £8.50 more than Kat. How much was the bill for? 2. What connects glorious, industrial and Russian? 3. Which English Commonwealth Games gold medallist may IDEALISE WHIST? 4. Which is the odd one out: Freya, Sigyn, Thor, Wotan? 5. Crack the code to find three American composers: WJSG, POFPSF, QCDZOBR.

MASTERQUIZ

1. What geological process produces the rock debris known as moraine? 2. On which island is the writer Robert Louis Stevenson buried? 3. What was the name of the yacht in which Sir Francis Chichester singlehandedly sailed around the world in the mid-Sixties? 4. Dave Vanian is best known as the lead singer of which punk band? 5. Which Normandy town features a dummy paratrooper hanging from its church roof in memory of the D-Day Landings in 1944? 6. Who is the current United States Ambassador to the United Nations?

1 Eighty pounds. 2 They may all precede revolution. 3 Lisa Whiteside. 4 Sigyn; the other Norse deities have days named after them (Friday, Thursday, Wednesday). 5 Ives, Barber, Copland (A becomes M, B becomes N, etc).