su doku
n.— «“You won’t find Su Doku in a Japanese dictionary,” said puzzle creator Wayne Gould in The Times of London. “It’s a coined word, made up by a Japanese publisher.…As I understand it ‘Su’ stands for number, and ‘Doku’ has some notion of singularity or bachelorhood about it, emphasizing perhaps that there is only one of each number in each unit (row/column/box).”» —“Su Doku Q&A” News-Sentinel (Fort Wane, Ind.) Apr. 4, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...