#word math

So far in 2026, I've written 190,000 words total, which is a little over 1000 words per day. I'm currently on schedule to hit 380,000 by the end of the year.

In 2025, I wrote 350,000 words for the whole year, which was around 959 per day. I don't know what the count was at the midpoint of the year, but I image it was lower because a lot of that writing was loaded into the fall (I wrote 135,000 words in August and September alone, but then 0 words in December).

So this year is looking like it might be more productive. By July 1, 2025 I had only published two fics (50k and 40k), but ended up putting out ten overall. This year I've published four so far (14k, 69k, 65k, and 14k). I'll probably put out fewer total, but they’ll be longer/more robust because I don't write many 3-5k oneshots anymore.

方向 fāng xiàng Directions

北 Běi North

东 Dōng East

西 Xī West

南 Nán South

North east, south east, north west, etc. are all easy to remember with some simple word math.

The only difference is that while in English we put North/South first, Mandarin puts East/west first instead.

东 + 北 = 东北 [dōng běi] Northeast

Words of the Day

水 shuǐ Water

冫 + 水 bīng Ice

With your host, Zhongwen-lingblr

Like last week, this is another type that I imagine may show up again and again here. Because they're so small, there won't be as many long, branching deductions to do; they make a nice break between things like extra large Kakuro problems and extra large Nurikabe problems.

Here are three Word Math puzzles; specifically, each of these three is a long division problem. However, they're all wrong; ELEVEN divided by FIVE should not be ONE with remainder FOUR. To fix them, change each letter to a digit from 0 to 9, inclusive. Two different letters do not map to the same digit, and every instance of the same letter maps to the same digit. (So ELEVEN can change to 121314, but not 111314 [E=L] nor 123456 [E=1,3,5].)

Please enjoy!

—Thomas

         ONE FIVE | ELEVEN       FIVE       HFROE       HOLLU        IUIEN        HEHNE         FOUR          TEN FOUR | TWELVE       TFNO        ETLV        EUOE         NRRE         NOLE          TWO      NINE SIX | TWENTY    SIX      OEIN      OOWD        TNT      SIX      NIXY      NEYS       ONE