Sunday Times Teaser 2675 – Should Old Acquaintance …

by Victor Bryant

I have assigned integer values between 1 and 26 (in some order) to the letters of the alphabet, two specific values being A = 5 and B = 24. The values of words are then determined by the sum of their letter values.

As a result the value of OLD is the average of the values of SHOULD and ACQUAINTANCE. The values of NEW and YEAR are the same and are equal to the value of OLD when its two digits are reversed.

The above information is sufficient to deduce the values of N, E and W.

What is the value of the word NEW?