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My Best Canadian Place Name Transadditions, Darryl Francis Aug 2006

My Best Canadian Place Name Transadditions, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In "50 Best Canadian Place-Names" in the February 2004 Word Ways, we offered a list of Canadian place name transpositions. Here we present a list of 69 Canadian place names for which there are 200 transadditions. We chose to limit the list of 200 but we could have found further examples. We also could have increased the number of place names, but the lengths would have begun to fall below the nine-letter level.

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Joaquin Through The Pangram Window, Eric Chaikin May 2006

Joaquin Through The Pangram Window, Eric Chaikin

Word Ways

Quick brown foxes and lazy dogs the world over were vext recently by an incident that set the field of "accidental pangrams" agog, threatening to smash its beloved "window".

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 39 Issue 2 May 2006

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 39 Issue 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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The Best Ten-Squares, Jeff Grant May 2006

The Best Ten-Squares, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

It is nearly 85 years since the first ten-square was published. American National Puzzlers' League member Paul M. Bryan (Tunste) exhibited a tautonymic square in the September 1921 Enigma. The example was not perfect, however, with one word (ALALA) being arbitrarily doubled. Furthermore, as tautonymic ten-squares use only five different words, each in two positions, they are not true solutions to the challenge.

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I'M (Alas!) A Salami, Win Emmons May 2006

I'M (Alas!) A Salami, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Many additional palindromes can be found on my website http://www.palindromania.com.

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All-Diagonal Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch May 2006

All-Diagonal Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

When I first subscribed to Word Ways and enquired about word squares with diagonal words, Jeff Grant commented that such items were rare and hard to find. That is true, but here is a rather belated replay!

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Kickshaws, Dave Morice May 2006

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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The Generation Game, Susan Thorpe May 2006

The Generation Game, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The families below are all single parent families with a difference. The parent has never had a partner. All the offspring are produced asexually. The offspring in a particular generation are all the same length (letterwise). The letters are each assigned their alphabetical values (a=1, b=2, etc). Unreferenced words can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Locations, identified by country, are taken from The United States Board on Geographic Names.

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Some Really Unusual Words, Leonard R. N. Ashley May 2006

Some Really Unusual Words, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

I have been contributing these little quizzes to Word Ways for decades. Some have been easy, some not. This one is especially challenging, but give it a try. A quarter of them right would b good; half of them right entitles you to think yourself exceptional.

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Omitted Letters In Crosswords, Jeremy Morse May 2006

Omitted Letters In Crosswords, Jeremy Morse

Word Ways

Sixty or more years ago I read a humorous story - possibly by A.A. Milne - in which the two main characters were called ETAION and SHRDLU. Later I came to realise that these names were taken from a letter frequency list There are a number of these lists with small differences between them reflecting the context of the letter count. For Language on Vacation Dmitri Borgmann used one starting ETAISONHRDLU, differing from my author's only in the positioning of the S. This article is concerned with letters in crosswords, but it starts from the other end by looking at …

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New Partridge Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English, Robert Cass Keller May 2006

New Partridge Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English, Robert Cass Keller

Word Ways

The following account has been adapted from the Dec 24 2005 Guardian Unlimited review of Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor's two-volume, 2216-page work, available for $210.

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Igpay Words May 2006

Igpay Words

Word Ways

I remember loving to converse in Pig Latin (PL) when i was young. (To speak it, start each word with its first vowel, move the preceding consonant/s to the end and add a long A.) Some PL has even entered the language through frequent use (ixnay; amscray!). A couple of PL allusions in the November 2005 Kickshaws inspired me to seek words which in PL become other words phonetically.

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Letter And Word Frequencies, Rex Gooch May 2006

Letter And Word Frequencies, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Counts of letters and words have been made from various bodies of text over the years. Perhaps the earliest well-known corpus was the assembled by W.N. Francis and H. Kucera of Brown University (hence known as the Brown corpus). It contains one million words of American English from 1961 in 15 categories of 500 texts. If it has a use today, it is because matching studies were done of British English and Indiana English among others.

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"Sending A Clear Mixed Signal" Still More Amusing Bloopers And Anomalies, Don Hauptman May 2006

"Sending A Clear Mixed Signal" Still More Amusing Bloopers And Anomalies, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Announcement: Having written a bunch of articles in this vein for Word Ways, I'm now working on a book with the same theme. If you encounter any amusing published errors or other content that lends itself to this treatment, I would appreciate receiving them. To document authenticity, I need originals or copies, sourced with the publication's name and date.

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Internal Isomorphs, Susan Thorpe May 2006

Internal Isomorphs, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Internal Isomorphs are what I call words which can be cut into 2 or more sections, each with an equal number of letters, and with identical letter patterns with reference to the number and position of repeated letters. Vowels and consonants are not differentiated. Thus the surname of the British Prime MInister (1945-51), CLement ATT.LEE is an internal isomorph.

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Ambidextrous And Antidextrous Words, Rex Gooch May 2006

Ambidextrous And Antidextrous Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the November 2001 Kickshaws, an ambidextrous word is defined as one whose first half contains only letters from the first half of the alphabet, and whose second half contains letters from the second half of the alphabet. An antidextrous word is defined the other way round. In the following, words of even length only are considered, to avoid the problem of the central letter in words with an odd number of letters.

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Wordplay In Astronomy, Mark Isaak May 2006

Wordplay In Astronomy, Mark Isaak

Word Ways

No area of study creates more new names than astronomy. The USNO B1.0 database includes about a billion stars, and the Guide Star Catalog II will contain about two billion stars and galaxies when it is done. Unfortunately for logologists, though, the vast quantity of names requires that virtually all of them be formed by conventional rules with no room from creativity.

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Embedding Many Words In Pi, A. Ross Eckler May 2006

Embedding Many Words In Pi, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The digits of the irrational number pi (3.14159265358597932384626...) not only go on forever but behave statistically like a sequence of random numbers uniformly distributed on 0,1,...,9; no matter how long it may be, any finite subsequence of digits will appear an infinite number of times.

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Shakespeare's Pangrammatic Sonnet, A. Ross Eckler May 2006

Shakespeare's Pangrammatic Sonnet, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Among Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, is there one that contains every letter of the alphabet? The letter Z occurs in 14 sonnets, the letter Q in 44, the letter X in 43, the letter J in 50, and the letter K in 151. Assuming that the letters occur independently and at random - not unreasonable for rare letters - the probability that all five letters occur in a single sonnet is (.09)(.29)(.32)(.98) which equals 0.0023. The probability that all 154 sonnets fail to produce is equal to (1-.0023) raised to the 154th power, or 0.67, so the probability of at least …

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Pun Quiz For The Punk Whiz May 2006

Pun Quiz For The Punk Whiz

Word Ways

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to provide the common phrases or words that the following punished misdefinitions refer to. For the shorter answers these are like cryptic crossword clues. Example: body building might be defined as the morgue. The numbers tell how many letters are in each word of the answer. Where it provides a clue, single word answers are broken down into part-words: means the answer is a 10-letter word made up of elements of 6 and 4 letters. My answers are at the back of this issue, but other answers may be possible.

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The Ascent Of Man, Rex Gooch May 2006

The Ascent Of Man, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Because Tony Augarde was quoted as saying some very strange about ten-squares in a British national newspaper. I decided to see how he tackled the subject in the Oxford Guide to Word Games (2nd edition, 2003), a review of which appears in W03-194. The newspaper had quoted an expert as estimating that 900 9-squares had been compiled: the book makes it clear that this was Dmitri Borgmann, so the estimate has long been overtaken by events.

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More Elementary Improvements, Susan Thorpe May 2006

More Elementary Improvements, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In Elementary Transadditions (February 2006), Darryl Francis lists the shortest transadditions he could find of 122 element names. These are a mixture of his own, recent, words and words documented as elementary transadditions in previous articles, including Ed Wolpow's Chemical Improvements (May 1995).

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Towards A More Logical Keyboard May 2006

Towards A More Logical Keyboard

Word Ways

As I age I notice more and more how much of touch typing involves my slowly failing left hand. For example, the left hand covers four more letters than the right, and the three most frequent letters (EAT) and seven of the top twelve (+RSDC) are on the left. As well, only one of the top seven (A) and five of the top thirteen (+SDHL) are on the central 'default' row, three of which (ASL) use the unathletic third or fourth fingers. None of the top eight letters and two of the least five (J and K) occupy the best …

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Answers And Solutions May 2006

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Anacrograms: Prolegomenon To Acrostic Anagrams May 2006

Anacrograms: Prolegomenon To Acrostic Anagrams

Word Ways

Take the initial letter of each word in a common phrase, saying or longer quote, rearrange them and form a word or phrase that summarises or relates to it. Such anagrams of acrostics I call ANACROGRAMS. Sounds passe? Maybe. Impossible? Usually: those I'll present later are a tiny fraction of all the candidates considered. But since the latter in turn form a very tiny fraction of possible sources, this new game opens virtually unlimited vistas for meaningful word play, perhaps as much as straight anagramming.

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We Need A Word For This!, A. Ross Eckler May 2006

We Need A Word For This!, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

According to Dmitri Borgmann in Beyond Language (Scribner's, 1967), the English language contains two or three million words. However, this is not enough to take care of all situations one meets in daily life.

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Double Word Squares From Scrabble Tiles, Mike Keith May 2006

Double Word Squares From Scrabble Tiles, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Here's a pretty problem, which I heard of recently from Scrabble player Eric Harshbarger (who heard it from another player, Jeff Myers, who says the problem has been kicking around for a few years): arrange the set of 100 Scrabble titles to make four 5x5 double word squares with all 40 words taken from one of the standard Scrabble word lists such as the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary.

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Colloquy May 2006

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Chemical Symbols Of Elements 110 And Beyond, Darryl Francis May 2006

Chemical Symbols Of Elements 110 And Beyond, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the February 2002 issue of Word Ways my article "The Symbols of the Chemical Elements" examined the symbols for the chemical elements with atomic numbers 1 to 109. Viewing the symbols as a sequence of 2010 letters, I presented words that occurred "naturally" in the sequence (CLARK and CONIC were five-letter examples), words that could be made by transposition of the letters in the adjacent symbols, and words that can be made by transposition of symbols and part-symbols.

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Did Xanadu Derive From Xamdu Or Xaindu?, Robert F. Fleissner May 2006

Did Xanadu Derive From Xamdu Or Xaindu?, Robert F. Fleissner

Word Ways

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's nonce-spelling XANNADU appears in the Crewe manuscript for "Kubla Khan, or a Fragment in a Dream" (T.C. Skeat, British Museum Quarterly 26 (1963), pp 77-83. Corrected or respelled XANADU in the printed version in 1816, this deserves a bit more etymological, linguistic consideration. The initial question is this: did it derive from Purchase His Pilgrimage alone, Coleridge having admitted the influence of this 1613-14 travel book, or from Purchase in combination with Milton's Paradise Lost, as J.B. Beer has claimed in Coleridge the Visionary (London 1959) I, 216? If the latter, was the word in Purchase XAMDU …

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