I think it&#x27;s more about how difficult it can be to do a binary search of the dictionary in your head.  I don&#x27;t want to spoil today&#x27;s word, and I&#x27;ve tried not to below, although there are minor spoilers.<p>Once I started to narrow it down it became difficult to find words between my constraints. In one case I was making assumptions about what letters can come after other ones while trying to generate a new word (and being aware of this isn&#x27;t enough to stop it.) And then, in the last case, when I had it narrowed between &lt;xyz&gt; and &lt;xyz&gt;ed (think jump and jumped, for example), my brain only wanted to search for words that were conceptually related to xyz.  This was a mistake, the goal word started with xyz but was not related to it conceptually, but again, an awareness that my brain was favoring a search of the concept space rather than searching the dictionary alphabetically was not enough to remedy it.