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A Poem: Natural Order, Jeremy Morse
Trading Places, Richard Lederer, Norm Storer
Trading Places, Richard Lederer, Norm Storer
Word Ways
A number of words become new words when, contemporaneously, the front letter is looped to the back and the back to the front. The first and last letters must be different, of course, and the result of this double loop is that the first and last letters are exchanged. If the middle letters are palindromic, the pair becomes palindromic.
Front Cover, Table Of Contents
Front Cover, Table Of Contents
Word Ways
Front Cover, Publication Information, Table of Contents
Ten-Letter Triangular Progressions, A. Ross Eckler
Ten-Letter Triangular Progressions, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
In the May 2009 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe introduced the concept of a triangular progression. Partition a six-letter word into groups of one, two and three letters. Calculate the numerical value of each group, and determine the difference between groups two and one, and three and two. The object is to find words for which the differences are constant.
Back To Albuquerque Again, Steve Kahan
Back To Albuquerque Again, Steve Kahan
Word Ways
Our third visit to Albuquerque offers a new collection of words named in honor of the city. Each contains a pair of identical letter triads that are separated by at least one other letter. After their excision, any gaps that have been created are closed by compression in order to form the residue of the original word. Said residues, found in Column A, require the reintroduction of appropriately placed triads found in Column B in order to reestablish the original Albuquerque word. As has become customary, five impostors are included in Column B, since each triad is available for use …
Shepherdesses, Jeff Grant
Shepherdesses, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
The 2-letter word MO can be extended by one letter at a time up to the 9-letter MODERNEST, with all combinations being allowable words in international Scrabble: MO, MOD, MODE, MODER, MODERN, MODERNE, MODERNES, MODERNEST. Seven of these are found in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition, 2006. The exception is MODER, a layer of humus intermediate between mor and mull (Chambers Dictionary, 1998).
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
A Poem: Pop-Star, Jeremy Morse
Elemental Crossword, Mark J. P. Wolf
Elemental Crossword, Mark J. P. Wolf
Word Ways
With a little bit of imagination, the Periodic Table of Elements can be seen as a rather strange and inelegant crossword puzzle, which is asymmetrical in form and contains such bizarre words like "RbSrYZrNbMoTcRuRhPd" and HLiNaKCuRbAgCaAuFr". After major readjustments, here is a crossword puzzle that solves some of those problems. Each square of the solution contains an element, which, when combined, completes a real word. Some elements are used more often than others, of course, and some are not used at all. One of the interesting things about this crossword is that it is not always clear from the boxes …
More Accidental Tautonyms, Jim Puder
More Accidental Tautonyms, Jim Puder
Word Ways
Tautonyms - i.e., words, phrases, etc. whose spelling is tautological - are of two kinds: terms such as froufrou and Pago Pago, which were fashioned from two or more identical subunits, and terms such as hotshots and valval, which were not. In the first group, tautological spelling is automatic, while in the second group its occurrence is a matter of chance.
Punc Lib Charades, A Anil
Punc Lib Charades, A Anil
Word Ways
Most charades involve respacing the letters, creating new words, as in therapist: the rapist. In contrast the following group do not change the words or spacing, only the punctuation. I call them Punc Lib charades. Like punk kids in the old sense, liberated puncs break out of their cages and run freely among the words wreaking havoc, totally altering if not reversing the meaning. The lowly comma in particular wreaks to high heaven.
Spelling Reform, Mark Setteducati
Spelling Reform, Mark Setteducati
Word Ways
European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
A Poem: Magic Word, Martin Gardner
Word Magic, Martin Gardner
Word Magic, Martin Gardner
Word Ways
These effects are excerpts from Gardner's forthcoming book on word play to be published by Sterling.
Anagram Calendar - Arranged Almanac, Dave Morice
Anagram Calendar - Arranged Almanac, Dave Morice
Word Ways
Anagram Calendar - Arranged Almanac anagrams the names of the 366 dates, the 12 months, and the 7 weekdays. "Each date's anagram is printed in its own calendar square (January First = "Fans, I jury art)," and the weekday anagrams are printed across the top of the grid (Sunday = "Say Dun"). In non-leap years, the square for February 29th should be omitted. The 2010 calendar year starts on a Friday. Any other year can be represented by shifting the anagrams to their appropriate squares.
Punk Whiz 8, A Anil
Spoonertoons 6: "With Phallus Amore Thought", Don Hauptman, Jim Siergey
Spoonertoons 6: "With Phallus Amore Thought", Don Hauptman, Jim Siergey
Word Ways
A collection of illustrations and spoonerisms.
The Vinturi, Scot Morris
The Vinturi, Scot Morris
Word Ways
Do you drink red wine?
A new wine-aerator has come along that is astounding in its effect. If I were still writing the Games column in OMNI I would do one about this. The inventor is one Rio Sabadicci who lives 20 miles away and I have interviewed him.
The Logologicomathematical 7x7 Puzzle, Jeremiah Farrell, Robert Friedhoffer
The Logologicomathematical 7x7 Puzzle, Jeremiah Farrell, Robert Friedhoffer
Word Ways
Reprinted with permission from Homage to a Pied Puzzler, ed. by E. Pegg, Jr., A.H. Schoen and T. Rodgers, AK Peters 2009 (www.akpeters.com).
Last Trip To Albuquerque, Steve Kahan
Last Trip To Albuquerque, Steve Kahan
Word Ways
The capital of New Mexico beckons once more with the final collection of twenty five Albuquerque words. As was the case in the previous three journeys, their residues appear in Column A below, the result of eradication of a twice-repeated nonadjacent letter triad. Thirty of these comprise the listing in Column B, including five masquerading impostors. In performing the reconstructive surgery, remember that no triad can be reinserted into more than one residue. The brainpower required to complete this task, while considerable, would probably not phase ST- that's EINSTEIN's residue after the removal of the duplicate triad …
Toward More Efficient Number Mnemonics, Mike Keith
Toward More Efficient Number Mnemonics, Mike Keith
Word Ways
As pointed out by Ross Eckler in the Nov 2008 Word Ways ("Mnemonics for Number Sequences", p. 297), the well-known type of mnemonic which uses the length of successive words to represent a sequence of decimal digits (with a ten-letter word for each occurrence of zero) is not particularly efficient. If the sequence of digits of π and e, for example) then in the long run this scheme will have an "inefficiency ratio", defined as (total number of letters used)/(number of digits represented), of 5.5. This is pretty far away from 1, which could be considered ideal in some …
Bishop Spooner Goes On Holiday, A Anil
Bishop Spooner Goes On Holiday, A Anil
Word Ways
First stop, Australia. (AIL, AUSTRALIA!) His reaction: Australia? STRAY, ALL YA! Surprisingly, he gave all eight Oz capital cities good loving (?) Spoonfuls, some cognates.
Odd One Out, Susan Thorpe
Odd One Out, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
This article investigates 10-letter words which consist of the same letters (in any order) in their first and second halves except for one letter, the 'odd one out'. In SEPTUPLETS, the letters S, E, P, and T are repeated in the second half of the word; L is the odd one out. This is a perfect example, the word is solid, familiar and all the letters of the first half are different. In many cases, however, the same letter appears twice within either, or both, the first and second halves of the word. Where this happens, as …
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.
Theology, A Anil
Theology, A Anil
Word Ways
It's a charade, isn't it, how Believers consider the study of religion to be the ology. As a blasphemer, I instead requisition THEOLOGY to serve as a logological term for studies of the word THE. (IF you object, just call it the-ology.) For starters, I investigated how much mischief can be wrought by iinserting "the" into the midst of known names, eponyms or pseudo-eponyms. The first below started it all and is the model for the rest. I exclude boring examples involving personal nouns, like Eric the Ambler, unless there is an affinity, like James the Brown. While most have …
Down But Not Out!, Oscar Thumpbindle
Anagrams And The Birthday Problem, A. Ross Eckler
Anagrams And The Birthday Problem, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
In his landmark book An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications (Wiley, 1950), William Feller describes the birthday problem, showing how to calculate the probability that in a given group of people at least two share the same month-and-day birthday. (For 23 people, this probability exceeds one-half.) Instead of talking about people sharing birthdays, one can consider words sharing letter distributions; two words having the same distribution are anagrams. It is easy to mathematically derive the probability that two or more share a birthday because the 365 possible birthdays are equally likely to occur. The analogous anagram probability is …
Atlas Shrugged, Oscar Thumpbindle