On a dark, stormy Halloween night, four kids named Luke, John, Sarah and Bob walk into a haunted house during a blackout. Only one can escape. They take a staircase to the second floor, a trapdoor on the left, then go up the ladder to the right, followed by a 28-foot slide to the basement through the mouth of a Giant Panda. In one corner of the murky cellar is a chainsaw, a dagger, a rope with a noose and an electric chair. Written on the wall in blood are the words, “Only one will survive – choose your death!” Bob takes the rope, Sarah picks up the dagger, John chooses the chainsaw and Luke uses the chair.
Five kinds of flowers grow in separate gardens on five different streets. Here is what you know:
1. The Smiths do not grow violets.
2. The Morgans grow peonies and do not live on 2nd street.
3. The Parks live on 3rd street.
4. Begonias bloom on 4th street.
5. Roses do not grow on 5th street.
6. The Johnsons do not live on 1st street.
7. The Rosens do not grow daffodils
8. The Johnsons grow roses
9. Daffodils grow on 1st street
Which flowers grow on in whose gardens on what streets?
Sequoia, eulogia or miaoued are all good options, but there’s an even shorter (and more obscure) word with all the vowels and not a single consonant: Iouea. It’s not the kind of word you’d use at the dinner table, but it’s listed in the Wikipedia dictionary as a genus of Cretaceous fossil sponges.
If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.