OT: Another NPR puzzle

[Jim Hurley]

Here is another NPR (National Public Radio) puzzle:

"From listener Frank Morgan, a mathematician at Williams College. (He 
also has a puzzle page at mathchat.org.) Think of a word whose 
meaning you can make plural by adding an A at the start. Start with a 
very common singular noun, add the letter A at the beginning, and 
you'll make the meaning plural. What word is it?"

Note that the "meaning" is made plural, not the word itself.

The straightforward approach is not very fruitful. Listing all words 
which can be derived by  pre-pending the letter "a" yields 559 words. 
Hard to find the word satisfying the conditions of the puzzle from so 
large a list.

The best I was able to do was a list of 103 words to choose from. (I 
realize that that statement is enigmatic.)

To save time it is imperative that the dictionary be converted to an 
array, i.e. for each word (tWord) in the dictionary:

     put  true into dictArray[tWord]

The dictionary is  compressed in a custom variable--see the "Get 
started button."

This is harder than the last NPR  puzzle. In the message box run:

    go stack url "http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/NPRpuzzle.rev"

It is a large file (370k) so be patient.


Jim