Sharpen your pencil and put on your thinking cap — it's time for a Sunday brain workout. Today we've got a "What Connects These?" puzzle: three sets of clues, and your job is to find the single word or short phrase that links the items in each set.
Editor's note: this puzzle originally ran with five sets, including one built on the word PEA and another built on the word BELL. On review, neither set held up — the clues didn't cleanly resolve to a single answer in either case — so we've pulled both rather than publish a broken puzzle. We'd rather run three that work than five where two don't.
The Puzzles
1. What connects these three?
The capital of Italy
A type of numeral system used by ancient Romans
A famous holiday in ancient Rome, "Ides of ___"
2. What connects these four, all built around the idea of "high" or "elevated"?
A South American mountain range
A type of coffee drink (Caffè ___)
A pun on the name of a running-shoe brand (used descriptively here for wordplay only — no partnership or endorsement by the brand is implied)
A word meaning "high" or "elevated" in Spanish
3. What connects these four?
A famous ship that sank in 1912
A type of large iceberg
The idiom "tip of the ___" — the small visible part of a much bigger, hidden mass
A slang term for something enormous ("the ___ of all problems")
Answers
1. ROME — the capital of Italy, Roman numerals, and the "Ides of March" all point to Rome.
2. HIGH / ELEVATED — the Andes (mountains), a Caffè Alto-style coffee pun, a running-shoe brand pun, and the Spanish word for "high" (alto/alta) all play on the same idea of elevation. Note: this one leans on wordplay and puns rather than a single literal word, so treat it as a theme puzzle rather than a strict one-word answer. The shoe-brand clue is a pun for puzzle purposes only; it isn't a claim about or endorsement from the brand.
3. ICEBERG — the Titanic, an iceberg, the idiom "tip of the iceberg," and slang for a huge hidden problem.