Quadrivial Quandary is a word game

Word game

Word games and puzzles are spoken or board games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.Word games are generally engaged as a source of entertainment, but have been found to serve an educational purpose as well...

 and a form of constrained writing

Constrained writing

Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form....

. The challenge is to write a single sentence that contains all four words from a daily selection. Success is determined by how well the composition illustrates the meaning and idiomatic usage of each mandated word, while obeying the grammatical and syntactic constraints of an English sentence. The best solutions also pursue an aesthetic goal, such as humor, brevity, lyricism, or thematic interest.

As Quandary requires participants to master the definition and usage of each word, it can be seen as a practice for building and reinforcing vocabulary

Vocabulary

A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...

. Inasmuch as the challenge involves strict constraints while permitting an open-ended variety of solutions, it can be seen as an exercise in creative problem solving

Creative problem solving

Creative problem solving is the mental process of creating a solution to a problem. It is a special form of problem solving in which the solution is independently created rather than learned with assistance.Creative problem solving always involves creativity....

. In contrast to word games like Scrabble

Scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works provide a list...

 that emphasize orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 and the breadth of the player's mental lexicon, Quandary emphasizes the semantics of words and the participant's ability to fuse unrelated concepts into a coherent whole.

While statements of fact are acceptable as Quandary resolutions, participants often address the challenge by creating a fictional scenario that connects the four concepts. These sentence-length stories can be seen as an extreme form of the flash fiction

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category...

 genre.

Wordplay

Quandary resolutions often exhibit various forms of word play

Word play

Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement...

. In some cases, wordplay is used as a problem solving technique. For example:

• To overcome the challenge of defining a fictional character in a single sentence, telling character names are often used. A person who dwells on a topic might be named Mr. Harper, while a composer of avante-garde percussive works might be named Maestro Banger.

• If a noun seems too specific to work into a given scenario concretely, the noun can sometimes be incorporated by way of metaphor or simile. For example, if the writer cannot fit an actual acnestis into a story, the writer might say that some other concrete and bothersome element in the story is “like an itch in the acnestis.”

• If the conventional usage of a word does not lend itself to the writer's theme or sentence structure, the writer might apply anthimeria
  Anthimeria
  In rhetoric, anthimeria, traditionally and more properly called antimeria , is the use of a word as if it were a member of a different word class ; typically, the use of a noun as if it were a verb.-Examples:*"I'll unhair thy head." * "The...
  
   or otherwise invent a nonstandard application of the word. For example, while the delirious lint-picking behavior known as carphology is generally considered a medical condition, a writer might use “professional carphologer” to describe someone hired to enforce a fastidious household regimen.

• When terms from rhetoric
  Rhetoric
  Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
  
   appear as Quandary words, participants might illustrate the term not by explaining it, but by reifying it in the sentence. For example, a Quandary resolution including the term aposiopesis
  Aposiopesis
  Aposiopesis is a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression of unwillingness or inability to continue. An example would be the threat "Get out, or else—!" This device often portrays its...
  
   might itself be cut short. When Quandary includes such words about words, it often generates sentences that themselves exhibit self-reference
  Self-reference
  Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
  
  .

Independent of its use in problem solving, wordplay also appears as a mechanism for increasing the humor or aesthetic qualities of the resolution, and as a means of intensifying the challenge. For example, some participants have resolved the Quandary while electing to satisfy the additional constraints of a poetic form, such as a limerick

Limerick

Limerick is the third largest city in the Republic of Ireland, and the principal city of County Limerick and Ireland's Mid-West Region. It is the fifth most populous city in all of Ireland. When taking the extra-municipal suburbs into account, Limerick is the third largest conurbation in the...

.

Word sources

Quandary focuses on words that are in some way interesting or uncommon. To this end, Quandary makes use of the words of the day as chosen by various dictionary websites. The Quandary site moderator decides which sources to use in general, but does not seek to engineer a particular combination of words on any given day. Word sources have included Wordsmith.org, Wordnik

Wordnik

Wordnik.com is an online dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content, some of it based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE...

, Wiktionary

Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...

, Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster

Merriam–Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language .Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a...

, Reference.com

Reference.com

Reference.com is an online encyclopedia, thesaurus, and dictionary. The site also provides machine translation and web search.Reference.com was launched by InReference, Inc in February, 1997. The site was later acquired by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. In 2005, Lexico announced that Reference.com...

, and Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary is a Web-based dictionary of slang words and phrases, which contained over 6 million definitions . Submissions are regulated by volunteer editors and rated by site visitors...

. By arrangement with contributors to The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form

The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form is an open collaborative project to compile an English dictionary whose entries all take the form of limericks. The project was originally called the "Oxford English Dictionary in Limerick Form", but the OED’s legal department advised against it...

, Quandary has also included limerick definitions of words.

History and status

Quadrivial Quandary was implemented as a website by software developer Rudi Seitz in September 2009, based on a game he had played with colleagues in the early 2000's over instant messaging.
As of June 1, 2010 it had 1248 published resolutions, visible in the archive section of the website.
The site is currently non-commercial

Non-commercial

Non-commercial refers to an activity or entity that does not in some sense involve commerce, at least relative to similar activities that do have a commercial objective or emphasis...

. Although site content is loosely moderated, there is no formal judging process and entries that break the guidelines of illustration and idiomatic usage do appear.

Quandary has been cited in the language blogosphere both as a challenge of interest to logophiles
, and as an educational activity that might build students' interest in writing
.

Parallels in language pedagogy

Quandary resembles certain exercises used in language pedagogy.

• Using an unfamiliar word in a sentence is a common technique for vocabulary building. In a classroom strategy called Possible Sentences, for example, students prepare for a reading assignment by writing sentences that include multiple words from the text to be read.

• Various exercises in sentence manipulation have been proposed as a way to build writing skills. In a sentence combining exercise, for example, the student is given two or more sentences and must compose one sentence that encompasses them. The educational merits of this exercise have been a subject of discussion and debate in the field of composition studies
  Composition studies
  Composition Studies is the professional field of writing research and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States...
  
  .Quandary resembles a sentence combining exercise, but is more open-ended, beginning with individual words instead of sentences. The participant might pursue a solution by first composing several sentences that each use one or two of the words. Finishing the solution then amounts to combining the intermediate sentences.

Related challenges

Other writing and speaking challenges based on mandated vocabulary include the following:

• In a thread on salon.com
  Salon.com
  Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
  
   started in 2004, each contributor attempted to write a sentence including five words selected by the previous contributor

• Collaborative fiction
  Collaborative fiction
  Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally - many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.-...
  
   sites have sometimes featured challenges that require participants to use a certain set of words in a story

• In the party game Literati Challenge a contestant must tell a story in 90 seconds, including the 5 words on the contestant's cards. Contestants must bluff when they don't know the definitions of the words.

• In the British radio show My Word!
  My Word!
  My Word! was a long-running radio panel game broadcast by the BBC on the Home Service and Radio 4 . It was created by Edward J. Mason and Tony Shryane, and featured comic writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir, famous in Britain for the series Take It From Here...
  
  , contestants were given a popular phrase and required to tell a story that used the phrase and proposed its origin.

• Word lists are sometimes used as prompts for poetry. In writing a word-list poem, the poet begins by choosing a set of provocative words or by taking word suggestions from someone else. The poet then tries to employ all the given words in one piece. For example, Tess Gallagher
  Tess Gallagher
  Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, author and playwright. She attended the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke and later Nelson Bentley as well as David Wagoner and Mark Strand...
  
  conceived one of her early poems, The Horse in the Drugstore, in response to a word list from a teacher.