Acrostic

Unscramble each row into a real word; the first letters, read down, spell the hidden word.

What it is

A short stack of scrambled words. Solving each fills its answer boxes, and the shaded first column — the initial of every answer — reads top to bottom as a hidden word. The scramble is the only clue; the acrostic is the reward.

How to play

Work the rows in any order: each scramble is an anagram of exactly one word in the puzzle’s vocabulary, so there is never a choice of answer. As the initials fill in, the hidden word often reveals itself before the last row is solved, and can be used to confirm the rest.

Purpose

The acrostic tradition — clued answers whose initials spell a message — dates to Elizabeth Kingsley’s 1934 Saturday Review puzzles and the New York Times’s long-running series. This is its purest mechanical form, and it lets the workspace ship an acrostic with an honest guarantee: rather than lean on clue definitions it cannot verify, it stands on the same proven anagram-uniqueness that lako-jumble established.

History

Modern acrostics were invented by Elizabeth Kingsley in 1934; the NYT ran her double-crostics from 1943 and has published acrostics ever since, alongside its famous crossword.

This implementation

• Spec knobs: hidden (the word to spell; empty picks one per seed), wordlist (override vocabulary), cell.
• Generation: runs backward from the hidden word — for each of its letters, a distinct anagram-unique vocabulary word beginning with that letter is drawn (shuffled per initial, so the same hidden word yields different puzzles across seeds), then scrambled to a spelling that is not the original.
• Guarantees: deterministic per seed; every row is anagram-unique in the vocabulary (so each has exactly one solution) and genuinely scrambled; the initials provably spell the hidden word — all three checked at build time, not assumed. Rated gently by the hidden word’s length (more rows to solve), and the metadata names the basis.