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Editorial

Word Ways

As it completes its thirtieth year of publication -- long than most cottage - industry magazines -- Word Ways faces a crisis. Post office regulations require at least 200 paid subscriptions in order to qualify for a second-class mailing permit.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 30 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Alpha(Betic) To Omega, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

Angry Archfiend, arched, aggressive as an ax attack,

Blather-brazen Beast Belial bashes, batters back

Compassion's courage ... Careless, coreless, cold! calumniates

Divity's Dread dreadless!

Ana Gram, The Juggler, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Come one! Come all! The unparalleled, incomparable, sensational Word Circus is in town! Hurry! Hurry! Scurry! to the Greatest Show on Earth, where words come out of the wordwork. Laugh at our lexcellent tour de farces! Thrill as letters fly through the air with the greatest of E's. Gasp as you become the Wizard of Ahs and A Lass in Wonderland.

Anguish Languish, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Willard Espy writes in his 1980 book Another Almanac of Words at Play (Feb 12): "Anguish Languish, popularized by the late Howard L. Chance, is a form of punning in which words overlap to give an impression of other words, as clouds assume forms according to the fancy of the observer."

Varieties Of Balanced Words, Part 2, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

2. Numerical Tautonyms

This is the second of three parts of an article dealing with varieties of "balanced" words. Numerical tautonyms are words which may be divided into groups of letters, each group having the same number of letters, and where the sums of the numerical values (A=1, B=2, etc.) of the letters in each group are the same.

Kickshaws, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

F. P. Ramsey, Meet Scrubwoman Edith, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

F. P. Ramsey (1903-1930) was a philosopher, logician, and mathematician who died young after an ill-fated operation. He was a product of England's Cambridge University when both Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein were there.

Yet More Murderous Wordplay, Peter Newby

Word Ways

William Marwood was the principal hangman of the United Kingdom during the years 1874-83. Such was his fame that a contemporarty children's riddle went as follows.

Glossery, Nyr Indictor

Word Ways

What do the following two alphabets have in common?

Four Universal-Recipient Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In "The Suet Alphabet", Nyr Indictor noted that one can add each letter of the alphabet (except for Z) to SUET and rearrange to form new words. Finding such universal-recipient words is a time-consuming challenge but not a mission impossible. In the four examples below, all words are OED except ROEX's.

Holy Mackerel, Mr. Rice!, Robert C. Layton

Word Ways

I'm not SHERBET the following story is reported to be true. You don't have to swallow it but it comes form one who knows her ONIONS, and is not prone to FUDGing. Some say she's full of BOLOGNA but the proof is in the PUDDING. At least LETTUCE keep an open mind as we explore her tale!

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Statistics Of Word Neighbours, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The word reported here was undertaken during preparation of an article on Word Ladders: I felt in need of some facts to direct my efforts, and to clarify some remarks others had made. This article presents the frequency of occurrence of some types of words, and compares this to a "theoretical" frequency. The theoretical frequencies are based upon very simple assumptions. Nevertheless in some cases the predictions are quite good: in other cases I seek to find why the predictions are poor.

Poegematry, Michael Helsem

Word Ways

Poetry & Gematria remain at an uneasy distance, not quite speaking not quite ignoring each other. One flourishes in exile, slipshod & ever prouding [a coinage from Ken's Saro-Wiwa's novel Sozaboy, published in 1988 by Longmann]; the other dwells among qabbalistic catacombs & cranks.

Geometrical Words: Part 2, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Part 1 of Geormetrical Words looked at words whose letters can be arranged to make a triangle or a set of triangles. Part 2 looks at words whose letters can be arranged to make other geometrical shapes. As with triangles, the letters along the edge of these shapes may form edge words (MET, HER and SON below).

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Palimericks, James Puder

Word Ways

Limericks and palindromes both being popular forms of linguistic recreation, it occurred to me to wonder whether the two could be salutarily combined. Is it possible to compose a decent limerick which is also an end-to-end palindrome? And if so, is it worth the trouble?

Long Words In The Oed, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

"What's the longest word in the dictionary?"

"You mean -- the longest English word."

"Yeah."

"Well, that depends which dictionary you go for. Bigger dictionaries have more words in them, and smaller dictionaries have fewer words in them. There's more chance of bigger dictionaries having longer words. You takes your choice."

Wysi Not Wyg, Mary Christine Craig

Word Ways

There must be a logological name for word definitions composed according to the way the words sound (and perhas getting close to the actual meaning of them), but I can't come up with it. What you see is not what you get!

The Oed Misinterpreted, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Back in 1965, Dmitri Borgmann pronounced that PREDETERMINIST was not the kind of word that you could find in a dictionary (see p 87 of Language on Vocation).

Presidential Letter Shifts, Monte J. Zerger

Word Ways

The next presidential shift will occur in the year of Arthur C. Clarke's classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The letters in the name of the rogue computer, HAL, can be shifted forward one letter in the alphabet to produce IBM: HAL(1)IBM. This is probably the most widely celebrated case of alleged letter shifting, although Clarke denies any intentionality. Rivaling this is notoriety is the shifting of FBI by six letters to obtain LHO, the initials of Lee Harvey Oswald, something numerologists love to link with the sixth floor from which the shooting took place: F BI(6)LHO.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 30 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Upperlands In The Netherlands, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

I first heard of Dutch logology in the summer of 1979, when Martin Gardner forwarded to me an article on Dutch palindrome that was sent to him by Hugo Brandt Corstius, then a professor of linguistics at the Institute of General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. (This article, "Nepapen", was translated by George Levenbach and appeared in the November 1979 Word Ways.)

Polygonal, Pyramidal, Prismatic Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

By considering the assignment of letters to points on plane figures and solids, this article provides a general classifications of words which includes, among other categories, words already known as isograms and pyramid words.

Don't Waste Words: Recycle!, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

Having lived in both New York and a rural state where the residents get up in arms whenever some local businessman or landowner applies for a landfill permit that will accept New York's waste, I'm sensitive to the dumb debate.

The Suet Alphabet, Nyr Indictor

Word Ways

Take the word WORD. Add an N, and you can make DROWN, add an S and you can make WORDS or SWORD. Add a J and you get... well, nothing, actually, because no combinations of the letters WORDJ make a word. Are there any words that can combine with a J to make a new word? Of course: SAW + J = JAWS; BAA + J = BAJA, etc. Are there any words that can combine with any of the 26 letters to make a new word? Such a word would be a universal recipient, like someone who has type …

Dual Cryptograms, M. Douglas Mcilroy

Word Ways

Newspaper cryptograms are usually easy to solve. They may get hard when they're made of words with unusual letter statistics. But no matter how hard they are, when you solve them, you can be sure you got the right answer. Cryptograms longer than about 30 letters (known to codebreakers as the 'unicity distance') just don't have two solutions. Or do they?

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.