The image is made by overlapping the first word rotated 90 degrees clockwise with the second word rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Which are the words?
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In Moiré pattern puzzles involving rotated text, the main lines come from the dominant strokes of the letters (usually vertical), and the interference patterns (the "ghost" images or breaks) come from the minor strokes (usually horizontal).
All four candidate words are six letters long, which matters here because two words of different lengths would not line up evenly once rotated and laid over each other.
Beyond the matching length, BROACH and BREACH also share the same first two letters and the same last three letters, differing only in their third letter, which means their rotated silhouettes line up closely enough to blend into one dense pattern rather than two separate, disconnected shapes.
The other pairings either repeat the exact same word, which would just double up a single pattern instead of overlapping two different ones, or mix in BROOCH, whose double O breaks that close letter-by-letter alignment with its partner word.
So BROACH and BREACH is the pairing whose shared skeleton actually produces the kind of overlapped image described.
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Approach Solution -2
A different angle is to first rule out any pairing that would not even make sense as a puzzle, and then check the letter shapes of what remains.
BROOCH and BREACH: plausible as a pair of different words, but BROOCH's rounded double O contributes very little to the angular, straight-line pattern the rotated overlap needs.
BREACH and BREACH: repeating the identical word means the question would not describe it as "the first word" and "the second word" if they were meant to be the same, so this pairing does not fit the way the question is phrased.
BROACH and BROOCH: again pairs a word full of straight strokes with one built mostly from curves, giving an unbalanced, sparse overlap rather than the fuller pattern implied by the image.
BROACH and BREACH: two genuinely different words, both built mostly from straight-edged letters, giving a balanced and full set of overlapping strokes once rotated in opposite directions.
Ruling out the self-paired option on how the question is worded, and ruling out the two options that pair in a rounded, curve-heavy word, leaves BROACH and BREACH as the only sensible pairing.
Therefore, the correct answer is BROACH and BREACH.
