Jumble

Jumble is a word puzzle with a clue, a drawing illustrating the clue, and a set of words, each of which is “jumbled” by scrambling its letters. A solver reconstructs the words, and then arranges letters at marked positions in the words to spell the answer phrase to the clue. The clue and illustration always provide hints about the answer phrase. The answer phrase frequently uses a homophone or pun.

Jumble was created in 1954 by Martin Naydel, who is better known for his work on comic books. It originally appeared under the title "Scramble". Henri Arnold and Bob Lee took over the feature in 1962 and continued for at least 30 years. As of 2013, Jumble is created by David L. Hoyt and Jeff Knurek. Jumble is one of the most valuable properties of its distributor, US company Tribune Content Agency, which owns the JUMBLE trademarks and copyrights. Daily and Sunday Jumble puzzles appear in over 600 newspapers in the United States and internationally.

The current syndicated version found in most daily newspapers (under the official title Jumble, That Scrambled Word Game) has four base anagrams, two of five letters and two of six, followed by a clue and a series of blank spaces in which the answer to the clue fits. The answer to the clue is generally a pun of some sort. A weekly "kids version" of the puzzle features a 3-letter word plus three 4-letter words. In order to find the letters that are in the answer to the given clue, the player must unscramble all four of the scrambled words; the letters that are in the clue will be circled. The contestant then unscrambles the circled letters to form the answer to the clue. An alternate workaround is to solve some of the scrambled words, figure out the answer to the clue without all the letters, then use the "extra" letters as aids to solve the remaining scrambled words.