Kangaroo words

A kangaroo word carries a smaller synonym of itself, spelled in order among its own letters. BLOSSOM hides BLOOM. The hidden word is the joey; the letters it sits in are the pouch. The joey's letters keep their order but need not sit together — they are picked out along the word, the way B, L, O, O, M lie inside BLOSSOM.

The name is usually traced to mid-twentieth-century American word-puzzle columns, and the class has been collected by puzzle writers ever since. It is a small one: most English words hide shorter words, but very few hide a genuine synonym of themselves.

Examples

• BLOSSOM BLOOM
• MASCULINE MALE
• CURTAIL CUT
• RAPSCALLION RASCAL
• CATACOMB TOMB
• ENCOURAGE URGE
• PRECIPITATION RAIN
• DECEASED DEAD
• FRAGILE FRAIL
• INSTRUCTOR TUTOR
• PROSECUTE SUE
• DESTRUCTION RUIN

Relatives and coincidences

The eye wants every pair to be family, but the class splits in two. Some pairs really are related: MASCULINE and MALE both descend from Latin masculus, so the joey is a bloodline relative carried in the pouch. Others are pure accident: CURTAIL comes from curtal, a horse with a docked tail, and owes nothing to CUT — the synonym inside it is a coincidence of spelling. You cannot tell which is which by looking, which is half the pleasure.

The house rules

To count as a kangaroo word here: the joey's letters appear in order inside the word; the joey is a real synonym, attested by thesauruses rather than by squinting; and a word merely containing its own stem — LATEST hiding LATE — is a lesser specimen than one hiding a different word altogether, the way CATACOMB hides TOMB.

Play today's puzzle

Hidden Joey is a free daily game about these words — three rounds a day, and every round ends with the true story of where its word came from.