Here in the UK, a common variant is to display words 1 and 3 and let you guess word 2. For example, Chris Maslanka's puzzles (known as "Missing Links") in last Saturday's Guardian has "crying hound", the solution being "wolf" (crying wolf and wolf hound.) More cunningly, the standard example "bat man" has the solution "he" for "bathe" and "he-man" so he allows concatenations.

I love puzzles and often I find more pleasure coding Perl snippets to solve them than I would solving the puzzle directly, particularly if they involve anything tedious :-). I am sure many fellow monks feel likewise.