WordWalk Puzzle Solving Strategies (Part 3)

Sometimes none of the subwords begin with the same letter as the rootword. Consider this puzzle: 

 

 Here the rootword begins with P, but none of the subwords do.  What to do?

You'll have to use intelligent guessing that eliminates possibilities.  Suppose we try for the first subword "ITS".  Since I is a vowel, it will have to go into one of the two diamond shapes.   But which one?

Sometimes it is useful to count the number of arrows going into and out of each shape.  The top left diamond has seven such arrows while the right diamond has 6.  Since I is more common than the other vowel, it is more likely that the left one takes the I and the right one the U.  That's the correct guess, and so we now get:

Now, where does the T go?  T follows I in at least two of the subwords and I follows T in at least of the subwords.  So, we can expect an arrow coming from the I to the T and vice versa, which mean we can certainly rule out the lower left bubble.  That leaves either the center left bubble or the lower right bubble.  Let's go for the lower right.

Woohoo!  Lucky guess!

The S now ought to go into the lower left bubble, because that bubble also points to the P, which will be needed for the subword "SPIRIT".  The center left bubble does not point to the P. 

With the I, T, and S placed, the rest should be easy.  "SPIRIT" follows immediately and requires the center left to be the R.  The remaining diamond is, of course, the vowel U, which we'll get by tracing out "TRUST".   "TIP" will then give use two new arrows and "STIR" will do something similar (but won't give us any new letters or arrows).

But let's now try to guess the rootword!

We can see we'll need a "PU", "UR", and a "UI" as digrams.  Possible trigrams are  also indicated:  "PUI", "SUI", "SUR", as is also a possible quadgram:  "RSUI" and "RSUR".

Can you guess the rootword?

It's "PURSUIT".