Solution

The key to solving this mystery was to look past the titles and instead inspect the steps of the ladder. Each Raddle in this theme had one* step of the ladder that was a homophone of an English letter. They were:

Which spells the answer, PROBITY.

Probity is "the quality of having strong moral principles; honesty and decency." It's an uncommon word, but I chose it because I was looking for a:

• seven-letter word,
• composed of seven different letters,
• each of which had a common, clueable homophone.

… and there aren't too many!

*In fact, to my chagrin, there were two red herrings in this set. In the first Raddle, I included the French word "au" which is pronounced "oh", like the letter O. In the Feb 26 Raddle, I included "see", like the letter C. These were accidental inclusions, not intentional red herrings. It's pretty wild for that to happen twice in one week, since the frequency of letter-homophones in Raddles is pretty low. On top of that, I actually caught myself including a red herring in a different puzzle and removed it, so (in theory) I was on the lookout for more. Sorry about that!

Our randomly chosen winner is…

Em & Nate

Solvers

Congrats to all 221 of you who got it right!

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