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New Phonetic Name Search Algorithm, Alan Frank
New Phonetic Name Search Algorithm, Alan Frank
Word Ways
Telephone books work because the listings are generated in a way that ensures that the company has the correct spelling of your name, and when your friends look you up, they'll also generally have a pretty good idea of how it's spelled.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 25 Issue 4
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 25 Issue 4
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Pygmalion: A Pappus Word Game, Jeremiah Farrell, David Wright
Pygmalion: A Pappus Word Game, Jeremiah Farrell, David Wright
Word Ways
The theorem of Pappus is a result from projective geometry about nine points and nine lines. It can be used as a basis for a word game similar to the game of David Silvermann using the word stockpile ARMY CHAT FISH GIRL HORN KNIT SOUP SWAN VOTE (A. Ross Eckler, "Word Recreations" (Dover Publications, 1979), p. 113).
On Teaching Palindromes, Steven J. Chism
On Teaching Palindromes, Steven J. Chism
Word Ways
Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines palindrome as "a word, verse, or sentence that reads the same backward as forward". As is often the case with limericks, sonnets, and other highly-structured but nowadays seldom-pursued literary creations, the few frequently-anthologized examples have come to be the only examples we know. This is certainly the case with the palindrome.
Foursquares:Four Letter Word Fun, Don Morrison
Foursquares:Four Letter Word Fun, Don Morrison
Word Ways
The four-letter words in this article are neither offensive nor vulgar, and for the most part do not relate to excrement or copulation. This disavowal is made up front so that you won't waste time looking for the nonexistent X-rated words.
Climbing The White-House Ladder, Leonard Gordon
Climbing The White-House Ladder, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
In a recent radio contest, Will Shortz asked for a Carrollian ladder with WHITE to HOUSE using all common words, and not allowing four-letter words pluralized with S. The Central ladder below is the solution he accepted. Lets see what one can do using less-common words form various dictionaries, or capitalized words.
Barcelona, Darryl Francis
Barcelona, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Summer, 1992: the World Olympics, Numerous hours of televised sport, early in the morning; throughout the day and evening, set watching hours of physical action, how about giving yourself some mental exercise?
Siamese Triplets, Peter Newby
Siamese Triplets, Peter Newby
Word Ways
Alongside is a nine-letter word example of my latest development in the technique of the insertion/deletion. As many long words consist of two or more simple words, one can, by considering these elements independently, bring into the realm of wordplay many long words otherwise denied standard treatment. Beauty of presentation is maintained by restricting all actions to within the confines of a rectangle, though other possibilities will be mentioned later. For convenience, therefore, I will refer to the original example as a rectangular triplet.
The Ugliest Words In English, A. Ross Eckler
The Ugliest Words In English, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
More than twenty years ago, Wilfred Funk proposed chimes, dawn, golden , hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring and tranquil as the ten most beautiful words of the English language. More recently, Willard Espy generated gonorrhea, gossamer, lullaby, meandering, mellifluous, murmuring, onomatopoeia, Shenandoah, summer after and wisteria for the "Book of Lists #2" (1980).
Some Conventional Anagrams, Mike Morton
On Word-Botching, Ted Clarke
Chit-Chat And Bibble-Babble, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Chit-Chat And Bibble-Babble, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Word Ways
"Baa-baa" goes the sheep, "gusy-gusy" used to mean "macho", and birds go "tweet-tweet". I trust you will not be shattered, like "Humpty-Dumpty", by these request for reduplication.
Kickshaws, David Morice
Instructions To Authors
Word Ways
Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.
Greenwood Grammar, Douglas Greenwood
Greenwood Grammar, Douglas Greenwood
Word Ways
I don't know whether these (mostly) four-line verses of rhymed couplets deserve to be called recreational linguistics - but it has been fun comping them! There are many more figures of speech which could have been similarly treated; perhaps other Word Ways readers would care to try. These quatrains have the named figure of speech built in as an example: I hope the additional commons don't belabor the point too much. My thanks to the editor for improvements on some of the verses.
X-X Word Update, Jeff Grant
X-X Word Update, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
The letter X has always fascinated people. It represents that unknown, the indefinable, the mysterious. An X may be used to designate a kiss, a ten-dollar bill, a type of chromosome, and a strength of ale, as well as a person's signature, a mistake, hybridity, and a movie rating. The X-Lexicon is an unpublished collection of approximately three thousand terms beginning with X (there are 486 solid-form X-words in the Air Force list of Webster's Second Edition). To further illustrate its comprehensiveness, the X-Lexicon contains 376 terms starting xanth-, from Xanthaea to xanthylium.
Gulf War Communiques, Howard Richler
Gulf War Communiques, Howard Richler
Word Ways
During the Gulf War, all official commiques were written in English. Unlike Indo-European languages, Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left.
It's Raining, It's Pouring, Kay Haugaard
It's Raining, It's Pouring, Kay Haugaard
Word Ways
Do teachers still tell students not to say "They say summer's going to be cool" or "They say magenta and turquoise are the hot new colors" because "they" in this usage is too indefinite? "Who does it refer to?" was always the standard question my teacher posed. "Who are 'they' and who are doing all these things?" she would ask emphatically, then go into something about antecedents.
Roller-Coaster Word Chains, Leonard Gordon
Roller-Coaster Word Chains, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
In the Nov 1990 issue of Word Ways, Christopher McManus suggests finding ana-gram-mar chains in which word lengths increase and then decrease along the chain. Since jillions of ana-gram-mar chains are possible,k this is a good way to provide limits, but his idea can be improved by a more restrictive rule: increase or decrease in word length must be without halts, i.e., without inclusion of the chains of words of the same size. What is the longest chain with this new rule? Some fairly long ones are given below.
Mother Of Anagrams, Susan Thorpe
Mother Of Anagrams, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Some mothers, as we all know, have definite delusions of grandeur and have to be brought gently down to earth. Endeavoring to distract my mother's attention from her latest "bete noir", I used a colloquialism when I said "DIG MENSA, MA", while explaining to her the round table organisation for people with high IQs.
Titles To Trace, Christopher Mcmanus
Titles To Trace, Christopher Mcmanus
Word Ways
We are proud of our unparalleled collection of specialized encyclopedias. We are now trying to trace the whereabouts of the following lost volumes. Can you help complete our sets?
The End Of The Word: J, Dan Tilque
The End Of The Word: J, Dan Tilque
Word Ways
The letter J is the second least common last letter in English, exceeded in rarity only by Q. Words ending in J are sufficiently rare that it is feasible to compile a list of all such words.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
-Gry Words In The Oed, A. Ross Eckler
-Gry Words In The Oed, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Now that the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is available on the Cd-Rom (see review elsewhere in this issue), and phrase ending in -GRY is that august work - and, at the same time, check the diligence of those who previously mined out these words by hand. There are, in fact, only seven words not previously spotted in the OED by Word Ways researchers; these are labeled with + below. One of these, UNAGRY, was noted in another dictionary. Five are variants or compounds based on ANGRY and HUNGRY: NANGRY, LAND-HUNGRY, LEATHER-HUNGRY, MAN-HUNGRY, AND YEARD-HUNGRY. The last one, …
Ann Owed, Hugh Denham
Ann Owed, Hugh Denham
Word Ways
I have been asked to right a ballad about a Laud of the Manna, Col. P. Riley of Great Holkham. As my spelling is sometimes a bit shaky, I ran my composition through the spelling check on the word processor; fortunately the programme did know discover any mistakes:
Reflexicons, Lee Sallows
Reflexicons, Lee Sallows
Word Ways
A lexicon is a dictionary or a list of words. Hence my use of "reflexive lexicon" or, more crisply, reflexicon, for a self-descriptive word list that describes its own own letter frequencies:
On Pruning Trees For Pangrams, Leonard Gordon
On Pruning Trees For Pangrams, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
In the February and May issues of Word Ways, Lee Sallows describes how he constructed a pangram machine (a special-purpose digital computer) to discover self-referential sentences of the form "This sentence contains five a's, two b's, ... and one z", after he realized that the program he had written for a general-purpose digital computer would trake 31.7 million years to run. There's no doubt that building the pangram machine was a personally satisfying accomplishment -- although I am afraid that it became his Galatea.
Another Palindromic Insertion, Jeff Grant
Another Palindromic Insertion, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
In the November 1982 issue of Word Ways, I exhibited a palindromic alphabetic insertion based on AA, a type of rought, scoriaceous lava. A complete list of 26 words was found, starting with AAA, ABA, ACA ... through the AZA.