A few months ago I was talking about the Autofill Project with my friend Trip. He asked me whether I included “alphabet sequences” in Default and, if yes, how I scored them. I do have alphabet sequences, mainly trios, in Default due to downloading the Cruciverb list. I haven’t worked with extensive lists of three-letter entries since I began the Project, but I plan to keep alphabet trios in Default and give them a score of 40, the same score given to uncommon abbreviations and most Roman numerals. At the time, I told Trip, “a lot of alphabet trios can be clued in other ways.”
I thought about this conversation recently and decided to try a sidebar blog post by scoring the 24 three-letter entries that could be clued as {Alphabet trio}. I was curious to see if indeed “a lot” of them can be clued in other ways, and if those other ways merit fill scores higher than 40.
DEF, GHI, and STU are cluable as single words or names. DEF has a modern slang option, in addition to Def Leppard and Mos Def, so it gets a 60. STU (Sutcliffe, Ungar, Disco ___) is a 55, and GHI, which can be clued as a type of Indian butter, is 50.
ABC is the strongest of the abbreviations/initialisms. With the TV network and Jackson Five song options, it gets a 65. Airline KLM is a 55, and JKL, an established initialism for ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live with some Scrabbly letters, also gets a 55.
MNO, TUV, and WXY are the remaining trios that can be clued as telephone key letters. TUV is a hypothetical abbreviation for the nation of Tuvalu, as on a sports scoreboard, but the 8’s telephone trigram seems a stronger option. WXY requires a clue clarification, now that Z’s are standard on telephone keypads, so it might as well be considered an alphabet trio. MNO and TUV are 45 and WXY is 40.
The Scrabbly XYZ Affair, a moderately familiar diplomatic gaffe of the late 18th century, is good enough for a 45 score for the partial. RST can be inferably clued as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and can also get a marginal fill score advantage of 45.
The remaining 13 trios have a couple of uncommon abbreviation approaches: binary-coded decimals in mathematics, the airport code for Hiroshima, a TV listing for Lifetime Movie Network, a computer instruction for “no operation performed.”
So, 14 of the 24 entries are scored as if they are clued {Alphabet trio}. That’s not “a lot” of them.
