I’m in the middle of a bunch of radio interviews for “Stump the Master” this morning, and then I’m heading to the airport in about an hour to fly to L.A. So I don’t have a lot of time for the blog today. Thank goodness for Wordplay Wednesday!

So the other day I read that in Greek mythology, the monstrous Medusa had a couple almost-as-monstrous stepsisters, Stheno and Euryale. Maybe they weren’t as ugly as Medusa, but their names sure were. “Stheno”? How do you even pronounce “sth” at the start of a word? Without spitting on your neighbor?

But the more I thought about it, I realized there are quite a few English words that contain the letters “sth” consecutively. In fact, there’s at least one common word in which “sth” is immediately preceded by each of the five vowels, a, e, i o, and u. Can you come up with a word for all five?

There’s even a (slightly less common) word in which “sth” is preceded by a y. Anyone?

Edited to add: These were gradually solved on a couple threads, including this one.