Every Word Is Three Letters: Hints

• The clues are regular (not cryptic) clues. Solve them.
• The answer to each clue is a word.
• The number associated with each clue is the answer's length.
• The clues are given in alphabetical order of the answers.
• The line of this puzzle near the bottom starting with "Key:" is key to the puzzle. Can you extrapolate the part hidden by ...?
• This hint slightly clues an aha moment. Does the format of the things corresponding to letters in the line starting with "Key:" remind you of anything? It's fairly domain-specific so it might not.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Can you think of a way to combine "every single letter swaps things" from the flavortext with the line starting with "Key:"?
• This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. In intepreting "every single letter swaps things", you should imagine that there are eight things.
• This hint gives away an aha moment. Every letter swaps two of eight things, as given by the line starting with "Key:" (for example, a swaps thing 1 and thing 3).
• This hint clues an aha moment (another one). If every letter swaps two of eigth things, what do multiple letters do? How can what the individual letters do be combined?
• This hint gives away an aha moment. What multiple letters do is what the individual letters do, in left-to-right order. So, ab first swaps things 1 and 3 and then swaps things 1 and 4.
• Note that order matters. ba doesn't do the same thing as ba.
• If you're thinking "right-to-left order makes more sense" after reading the above hints, that also works as long as you use it consistently. If you're not thinking that, this hint (the current one) will probably just be confusing and you should ignore it.
• This hint clues an aha moment (yet a third one). How might we be able to use the answers to the clues, given the above?
• This hint gives away an aha moment and clues another (yet a fourth one, I promise none of these aha moments are huge leaps). What do the answers to the clues do, when considered as multiple letters?
• This hint slightly clues an aha moment. All the answers to the clues are of odd length. Why? This might not be that helpful so if nothing jumps out at you then go to the next hint.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Sometimes one combination of letters does the same thing as another. For example, abb does the same thing as just a (the b's cancel each other out). Also, as given in the flavortext, everyword, drawn, and tornado all do the same thing.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Each answer is associated with a range of three numbers (the start and end of this range are the numbers to the left of the equals sign).
• This hint clues an aha moment. Two combinations of letters can only do the same thing if they both have an odd number of letters or both have an even number of letters (counting duplicate letters multiple times).
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Why is the puzzle titled "Every Word is Three Letters"?
• This hint gives away an aha moment. The answer to each clue does the same thing as some combinations of three letters.
• There's more than one combination of letters possible for each answer, though.
• This hint clues an aha moment (yes, a fifth one, though possibly smaller than the others). Each answer is associated with a range of three numbers from 1 to 45. These ranges together make all the numbers from 1 to 45.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Consider the row of numbers at the bottom of the puzzle.
• This hint clues an aha moment. The row of numbers at the bottom of the puzzle sums to 45.
• This hint gives away an aha moment. The row of numbers at the bottom of the puzzle is the enumeration of a phrase that can be made via the combinations of three letters corresponding to the answers, in the order given by the corresponding ranges.
• The phrase has a built-in enumeration for its answer.
• This hint suggests a method of doing research, and since it's the last hint, asking whether it can be skipped is meaningless. If you get the phrase and don't know the answer, searching the phrase might help. Though you might not get the answer right away, you'll probably encounter it after doing some small additional research.