u/ncvbn

On the May 12th Connections, there was a category in which currency names had a letter added at the end to form another word: REAL + m = REALM, WON + k = WONK, RAND + o = RANDO, and FRANC + i = FRANCI.

I understand the currency names: 'real', 'won', 'rand', 'franc'.

I understand most of the longer words: 'realm' is a very normal English word, 'wonk' is a slightly colorful 20th-century word, and 'rando' is a recent piece of slang. But I have no idea what 'franci' or 'Franci' is.

Merriam-Webster doesn't know, Wiktionary doesn't know, I can't find anything promising on Google, and as far as I can tell the online discussions on Reddit and the Connections Companion don't provide any information.

Does anyone know what word they were going for? Presumably there's a reason they had FRANCI rather than FRANCH or FRANCJ or FRANCX, FRANCY, or FRANCZ.

Here's an animated gif to illustrate the issue: https://i.imgur.com/yCsDn4N.gif

The behavior seems to occur with any selected text, regardless of whether it was selected with Ctrl, Shift, or the mouse/trackpad. Likewise, it doesn't matter whether the selected text is an entire word or just a letter. But it does seem to matter whether the selected text is in the same paragraph. And it also seems to matter whether the paragraph has had a carriage return inserted at the end of it: e.g., the behavior goes away once I press Enter at the end of the paragraph and then go back to edit it. Finally, it only affects italicized text that comes prior to the deleted text, and it seems to affect only the italicized text that's closest to the deleted text.

So this seems to be the rule: in any paragraph without a carriage return at the end, selecting and deleting text will automatically remove the space after the closest chunk of italicized text (if any) that comes prior to the deleted text.

Does anyone know what might be going on, or how to fix it? Thanks!

Can anyone explain "FRANCI"? [May 12th, 2026]

How can I fix this strange behavior in Outlook on the web? (It keeps deleting the space after italicized text simply because I deleted some selected text coming later in the same paragraph.)