BrainiLab Academy · Words & puzzles
Word detective: follow the clues
Eight short English lessons: follow context clues, explore meanings, rearrange letters, unpack blends and discover the contradictions inside everyday expressions. Optional quizzes included.
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What you’ll explore
A flower belongs in a vase. Flour belongs in a cake. They sound alike, so how do you know which one someone means?
Start with the clues around a word. Explore sound-alikes, meet words with opposite meanings and test a link across a set of clues. Then shuffle the letters of LISTEN into SILENT and find out what is hiding inside LEVEL. Unpack the two meals in brunch, discover why a fox and a sleepy dog keep appearing in type samples, then listen to a silence that feels deafening.
Each lesson builds on the last. Read at your own pace, try the examples and take an optional short quiz when you feel ready. There is no timer.
One discovery at a time
Your lessons, step by step
- 1
Read →3 min read · Quick quiz
What are homophones? Words that sound the same
Use a sentence to tell two sound-alike words apart.
Ready when you are - 2
Read →3 min read · Quick quiz
How can a word mean its own opposite?
Find out why dust can mean adding something or taking it away.
Ready when you are - 3
Read →3 min read · Quick quiz
How to find the link in a Connections puzzle
Test a possible link against every clue in a word puzzle.
Ready when you are - 4
Read →2 min read · Quick quiz
Anagrams: how did LISTEN become SILENT?
Rearrange a word without adding, losing or duplicating a letter.
Ready when you are - 5
Read →2 min read · Quick quiz
Palindromes: LEVEL has a neat little secret
Spot a palindrome and distinguish its rule from an anagram.
Ready when you are - 6
Read →2 min read · Quick quiz
Portmanteau examples: the two words hiding in brunch
Find the source words inside a blend and tell it apart from an anagram or a compound.
Ready when you are - 7
Read →2 min read · Quick quiz
What is a pangram? The quick brown fox has a job
Check whether a sentence contains all 26 English letters and explain why repeats are allowed.
Ready when you are - 8
Read →2 min read · Quick quiz
Oxymoron examples: how can silence be deafening?
Recognise an oxymoron and explain what the apparently conflicting ideas add to an expression.
Ready when you are
A few words worth knowing
- Context
- The words and situation around a clue that help you understand it.
- Homophones
- Words that share a pronunciation but have different meanings.
- Contronym
- A word with meanings that can be opposites.
- Anagram
- A rearrangement of all the letters in a word or phrase to make another word or phrase.
- Palindrome
- A word or phrase whose letters read the same forwards and backwards, under the stated spacing and punctuation rules.
- Portmanteau
- A word formed by blending parts and meanings of two or more source words.
- Pangram
- A sentence or phrase containing every letter of an alphabet at least once.
- Oxymoron
- An expression combining apparently contradictory words or ideas.
Curious to dig deeper?
- Merriam-Webster — Homophone
- Merriam-Webster — Dust
- Merriam-Webster — Fast
- Merriam-Webster — Bark
- Merriam-Webster — Anagram
- Merriam-Webster — Palindrome
- Merriam-Webster — Portmanteau
- Merriam-Webster — Brunch
- Merriam-Webster — Smog
- Merriam-Webster — Spork
- Merriam-Webster — Open, closed and hyphenated compounds
- Merriam-Webster — Pangram
- Wordsmith — Practical Uses of Pangrams
- Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries — Oxymoron
- Merriam-Webster — Oxymoron
Follow the sources, explore a little further, or tell us if something needs a correction. Suggest a correction.