Two Tasty Solutions: Expert Puzzles #266 & #268

Hello and welcome back to another Synonym Circuit Solution Explained article. In today's post I'll be revealing the solutions to the two hardest puzzles from last week: Puzzle #266 and Puzzle #268. Both of these puzzles were only solved by 9 players each on the day they were live.

Expert Puzzle #266 platter > taste

Solution (by LBDizz): platter > saucer > setting > atmosphere > flavor > taste

Thursday, November 28th's Expert Puzzle was solved by LBDizz in 4 links, which is the Global Record at the time of this writing. Platter only has synonyms for its primary definition: "a large plate used especially for serving meat." Of these, our Record Setter selected saucer, which is indeed another type of plate, traditionally thought of as a small round dish served with teacups.

Saucer opens up our options beyond plates, and gives us chinaware, dinnerware, pottery, setting, and more to choose from. LBDizz selected setting, as in "the articles of tableware for setting a place at table" which will definitely have many meanings and help us get away from plates and dinnerware.

From setting we see many synonyms related to an "environment" meaning, defined as "the circumstances, conditions, or objects by which one is surrounded." Atmosphere stands out for its meaning "a special quality or impression associated with something," which LBDizz likely felt could get them closer to their goal word taste.

Indeed, amongst the synonyms for atmosphere we see flavor, which will absolutely connect to taste, with its noun definition "the property of a substance that can be identified by the sense of taste." Big congrats to LBDizz for this awesome Global Record!

Expert Puzzle #268 chocolate > realize

Solution (by BTSrl): chocolate > morsel > taste > see > realize

The Expert Puzzle for Saturday, November 30 was solved by BTSrl in 3 links to claim the Global Record. BTSrl is the #1 Synonym Circuit player of all time, currently holding 30 Global Records! They are followed closely by jsaur with 25 Global Records, and ACR with 24! If you are any of these players, we'd love to talk to you. Feel free to email us at synonymcircuit@gmail.com if you're open to it!

Chocolate has four definitions: a beverage (often served hot in the US), a food made of roasted cacao beans, a candy coated in that food, and a brownish gray color. Most of our synonyms relate to the candy meaning or food meaning, and BTSrl started out by selecting morsel from this list.

Morsel has a few meanings with synonyms: "a mouthful," "a speck," and "a cipher" (which is a new one for me). From the synonyms related to morsel's "mouthful" definition ("a small piece or quantity of food"), BTSrl chose taste, likely thinking that this word would both open up additional meanings, and also pivot us from nouns to verbs, as our goal word realize only exists as a verb.

Taste has three noun meanings: "flavor," "mouthful," and "liking," and two verb meanings: "to experience" (as in "the adventurer tasted danger and lived to tell the tale") and "to sense" (as in "by your language I can taste that something is wrong"). Both of the verb meanings share see as a synonym.

Our goal word realize also has see as a synonym - in fact one definition of see is "to come to an awareness of," which is also the primary definition for realize. And there you have it, a 3 link solution by BTSrl. Awesome job!

Thanks so much for reading and for playing - if you have an Expert Puzzle you'd like the solution to, shoot me an email at synonymcircuit@gmail.com and I'll be sure to include it in a future blog post!