Whether you’re a crossword solver, cryptogram fan, Scrabble addict, or Sudoku savant, is guaranteed to tease your brain and twist your tongue. Puzzle master Alex Bellos begins in Japan, where we can observe some curious counting: = two balls = two ropes = two horses = two sheets of paper = five legs = five apples = five plates = five hippos Now, how do the Japanese say “nine cucumbers”?* a) b) c) d) Bellos finds the intrigue—and the human element—in a dizzying array of ancient, modern, and even invented tongues, from hieroglyphs to Blissymbolics, Danish to Dothraki. Filled with unusual alphabets, fascinating characters, and intriguing local customs for time-telling, naming children, and more, this is a bravura book of brainteasers and —it’s a globe-trotting, time-traveling celebration of language. *The word endings depend on shape: Flat things end in -mai and spherical things end in -ko. Cucumbers are long things (like ropes and legs), so they end in -hon. The answer is (a)!