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MITMH2022
Public Access

Love’s Labor’s Crossed

Heartford
Sometimes your significant other asks you to perform an unexpected task as a way to profess your love.

Create a 5x5 double word square, with 5 words reading horizontally and 5 different words reading vertically. Each of the 10 words can appear in the grid either forwards or backwards (right, left, down, or up), all at your discretion. Then, after each row, write the letter equal to the letter-value sum (where A=1, B=2, etc) of the word, modulo 26 -- for example, the word CUPID yields the letter A, because C+U+P+I+D = 3+21+16+9+4 = 53 = 1 [mod 26]. (Consider a result of zero to equal 26 = Z.) Those 5 row letters, in order, must spell either a word reading forwards or a word reading backwards. Then, under each column, write the letter equal to the letter-value sum of that column, modulo 26 (again, with zero = Z). Those 5 column letters, in order, must spell either a word reading forwards or a word reading backwards. Finally, the 5-letter word resulting from the across words, and the 5-letter word resulting from the down words, together must contain 10 different letters (that is, no repeats among them).

All words used in the task (the ten 5-letter grid words and the two 5-letter extra words) must appear in the Scrabble TWL06 wordlist freely available for download at https://www.wordgamedictionary.com/twl06/ and mirrored here.

When you have successfully completed the task, profess your love by submitting a single string of the 25 letters of your grid, in order (left to right, top to bottom), with no spaces or punctuation, here: