Can you solve these language puzzles? Test your skills with these problems from North America’s biggest linguistics competition

March 19, 2026

4 min read

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Can you solve these language puzzles? Test your skills with these problems from North America’s biggest linguistics competition

For 20 years, this computational linguistics competition has inspired new generations of innovators in AI and language preservation

By Emma R. Hasson edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition draws hundreds of middle school and high school competitors from the U.S. and Canada.

Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images

In January middle school and high school students at more than 200 host sites across the U.S. and parts of Canada competed in the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (NACLO), which involves finding and applying language patterns to solve tricky linguistic puzzles.

The more than 250 students who scored above the cutoff were invited to compete in today’s locally hosted invitational round, and eight or 12 eligible winners will go to Bucharest, Romania, for the 23rd annual International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in July.

These students represent the future of computational linguistics, a field that uses computers and algorithmic methods to detect and understand patterns in language. Interest in the field has skyrocketed as coders have used linguistic principles to build and improve large language models, which power much of today’s generative artificial intelligence. According to Lori Levin, one of the founders of NACLO and a computational linguist at Carnegie Mellon University, computational linguistics is a two-way street: “You’re either using a computer to do things with human language or communicate or translate or teach a foreign language, or you’re using computational techniques to learn something about human languages.” Her work documenting and preserving endangered languages uses a little bit of both.

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Tom McCoy, a former NACLO winner who is currently a competition organizer and computational linguistics researcher at Yale University, works to bridge the gap between how language is handled in large language models and how it’s described in linguistic theory. “This includes trying to understand what’s going on inside AI systems that process language, like ChatGPT, and then also understanding how we can use those AI systems to give us insight into the human mind,” McCoy says.

According to McCoy, who also writes crossword puzzles for the New York Times, writing and solving NACLO problems has a similar feel to what he does as a linguist. “It really is about trying to replicate that problem-solving experience that linguists are faced with,” he says. “I owe my career to NACLO.... I would have never learned about the field in time to join it if not for having done that in high school. And I’m definitely not the only one.”

Many NACLO participants end up working on computational linguistics in academia or industry; some others go on to study mathematics, computer science, chemistry or physics. “Regardless of what people end up doing, it is a great way for people to practice their problem-solving skills,” says Cerulean Ozarow, one of the winners of NACLO 2020 and a math teacher at Hunter College High School.

When Levin was asked to found a North American computational linguistics competition in 2006, her response was “I’ll do it, unquestionably.” Shortly after, the late computational linguist Dragomir Radev heard about Levin’s efforts; he called her up and said, “I’m going to be there whether or not you have the space and money for me.” The enthusiasm of NACLO’s co-founders, including Levin and Radev, for sharing computational linguistics with the world has carried through the ethos of the competition, which was first held in 2007 and is run solely through volunteer work. Levin strives to serve “all students—not just the ones who are going to win.” She and other NACLO organizers hope to reach even more students by adding an extra introductory round with more accessible questions.

Levin’s favorite part of running NACLO is “seeing the lights go on” for participants who are inspired to become a linguist themselves or are just having fun with language and learning about new linguistic possibilities. “Generally linguistics isn’t taught in school,” Levin says, “and so when you solve a NACLO puzzle, you suddenly see a way that language can be that maybe you hadn’t thought of.”

Below you can try five puzzles adapted from past NACLO competition prob