The digits tell you how long the word is and which letters it could use.
The clue tells you which word it is. You need both.
Words arrive spelled in keypad digits. A clue tells you what each one means.
The digits tell you how it is spelled. You need both.
Every word you decode gives up its first letter, and those letters spell the
transmission. Digits arrive one at a time, and the line is not always clean:
some come through lost. Three failures and it goes dead.