Slate has a new weekly puzzle called Soundbites

A puzzle that listens instead of reads

Traditional word games rely heavily on spelling patterns, vocabulary knowledge, or visual recognition. Soundbites flips that approach. Instead of focusing on letters on a page, players must think in terms of pronunciation.

Each clue leads to a word or phrase. From that answer, solvers extract a specific sound—sometimes a syllable, sometimes a phonetic fragment. Those sounds are then stitched together like pieces of an audio jigsaw puzzle.

The final step is where everything clicks: when combined correctly, the sounds form a single mystery word that may not be obvious from its written form at all.