Digital Commons Network^™

A Screwball Baseball All-Star Team, William Young

Word Ways

As we near the end of the twentieth century, baseball enthusiasts are compiling lists of the greatest players of the past hundred years. To complement the lists of players known for their accomplishments on the field, I would like to propose a Screwball All-Star Team made up of the anagrams of baseball players of the present and past. All of the names have been taken from the 10th edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Definitive Record of Major League Baseball.

Reversible Heterograms, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In my article "Statistics of Word Neighbours" in the Nov 2997 Word Ways, I showed that theoretical expectations matched actuality quite well for heterograms, words of a given length which had all letters different (Graph 2 in that article). In "Snakes and Ladders" I attempted to make ladders between heterograms which were also words when reversed. This article gives Fuller results of my investigation into reversible heterograms. The lists can act as a crib for people constructing palindromic phrases!

Reversed Placenames, Dan Tilque

Word Ways

Many years ago, I worked for a company which had been founded by a man named Joe Grebe. Mr. Grebe had passed away a few years before and some of the employees wanted to name something after him. They finally persuaded one of the railroads to rename a train stop at one of the company plants Eberg, the reverse of Grebe. With this reversal they joined in what is probably the most common form of wordplay used in forming placenames.

Trisograms, Quadrisograms, Quintisograms, Eric Chaikin

Word Ways

A previous article introduced a term bisogram to refer to a pair of words which does not repeat a letter, and described the search to equal the longest-known example, the 20 letter GUNPOWDERY BLACKSMITH. In this article, I described the search to equal the longest-known three-four- and five-word sets: triosgrams, quadrisograms, and quitisograms.

Scrabble-Friendly Eight Squares, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

There have been many articles on word squares in Word Ways over the last ten years or so. Many eight-squares have appeared, a few nine-squares, and even fewer (flawed) ten-squares.

Victus, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

For Christmas I thought it would be fun to surprise George Henley and give him heaven. Heaven knows, he suffered enough for it. Call it the theology of reversal, or just the word-opposite reversal of his original "Invictus".

Single Letter Prefixing, Rex Gooch, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Allow us to start with some simple definitions: this article concerns prefixing a single letter to a root word (root for short) to make another word, e.g., M prefixes the root AN to make MAN. In the January 1997 Wordsworth, Ted Clarke asked whether there was a longer set of four-letter words than a list of 16 based on IND as the last three letters.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

I'M Now Challenging Abysmal Pen, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Scarfin' Fatback's latest weapon of choice in the Word Ways word duel is the anagram, a treacherous tool for the wannabe logologist. Does he not realize that a sensible narrative is almost impossible to achieve when anagramming groups of 30 or fewer letters? I've read his Frostian parody of Mary's lamb three times and I'm still don't know what it says!

Banangrams 3, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams--anagrams to drive you bananas--consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagrams. Answers will be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Lamb Chops, My Weanling Eanling?

Word Ways

Well, if you weren't good you couldn't have stolen my works or claimed them easily. All right, you're good. But I have honed my cryptographic skills through centuries, and you are merely a Morristown mortal.

Mucho Ado About "Nothing", Thomas L. Bernard

Word Ways

It is axiomatic that if you have nothing you have "no thing." Delving into this realm of nothingness has revealed numerous creative ways by which speakers of English express this idea of nonentity. As with this previous word, most "nothings" seem to begin with an N: none, nil, null, nary, naught, nix, and the north of England's nowt. Of late, one even finds numerous instances of the Spanish "nada" creeping in.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

When In Rome, Make A Joke, Leonard Ashley

Word Ways

Some readers of Word Ways may be old enough to recall Fractured French: Jeanne d'Arc rendered as "no light in the toilet" and Honors de Balzac as "no hitting below the belt." Foreign languages are now much in decline and most people may not even get the joke in un deux trois quatre cing "one of the three kittens drowned."

The Hydra, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The poem below is a transformation of William Blake's "The Tyger" via an unusual linguistic constraint. Your challenge is to determine the constraint, given the hint that strict application of the rule will invariably result (as it does here) in a composition containing exactly 109 words.

Edge Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The letters of certain words can be arranged diagrammatically to make a variety of geometrical shapes, including triangles:

Word Ladder Squares And Cubes, James Puder

Word Ways

In its traditional form, the word ladder is a one-dimensional structure; even word ladder networks with many branching proceed in a basically linear fashion. But one can conceive of word ladders which extend solidly in two and three dimensions, in the manner of the familiar word square and word cube. This article will suggest some definitions and rules of construction which might reasonably apply to such arrays, and offer some illustrative examples.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Fifteen Alphabetic Playlets, Nyr Indictor

Word Ways

ANDROCLES AND THE LION

Dramatis Personae: Androcles, Lion

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 31 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

The Presidents, More Or Less, James Puder

Word Ways

IN a transdeletion, one or more letters are subtracted from a word and the remaining letters rearranged (if necessary) to form a new word. In a transaddition, one or more letters are added to a word to supply the letter-stock for a new word. The goal in each case is usually to transform one word into another with the fewest possible subtractions or additions of letters.

Mysterious Precognitions, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

Select any of the ten words in the first verse of Genesis. Count the number of letters in the word you choose. For example, suppose you select BEGINNING which has nine letters. Count ahead nine words, starting with the next word in the text, which brings you to THE, the second word of verse 2. This word has three letters, so you count ahead three more words to end on WITHOUT.

Heterograms And Their Alphomes, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

For the benefit of new readers, allow me to explain the terms heterogram and alphome. Heterogram is my preferred term for isogram, a word such as AMBIDEXTROUS in which no letter is repeated. In "Alphomes" in the November 1995 Word Ways, I defined an alphome as follows: a set of alphabetically-ordered letters of which at least one arrangement is a word. Thus the alphome ABINR makes the word BRAIN.

Doubly True Alphametics In Base 27, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In "Base 27: the key to a New Gematria" in the May 1993 Word Ways, Lee Sallows offered "immortal fame" in finding doubly true equations (those valid in both base 10 and base 27 notion). I do not know where he obtained authority to grant such fame, but I accept his challenge.

A Four Seasons Word Network, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the June 1938 issue of The Enigma, the official organ of the National Puzzlers' League, Ab Struse (David Shulman) wrote:

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Whitman Retransposed, James Puder

Word Ways

"Vocabularyclept poetry" is the term Howard Bergerson coined to describe a poem created by a rearrangement of the words of another poem. In the May 1971 Word Ways, and subsequently in his landmark 1973 book Palindromes and Anagrams, Bergerson illustrated the concept with his word-unit transposal of a 100-word Walt Whitman poem, "Poets to Come."

Alphametish Cabell, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The Virginia writer James Branch Cabell, author of the novel Jurgen (1919), was the target of an obscenity trial by John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The story is told in the following poem, written in Alphametish: in each line, the letters can be replaced by digits to form a valid sum, as illustrated by SEND MORE MONEY to 9567 + 1085 = 10652.

Elf Eyrie, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

From the irrelevant heights of his little cliffside nest, Scarfin; Fatback (my elf) and I thought that the puckishness of editorial replies to authors might be an interesting theme to eyriely explore. Would you believe that just a single trip to the local library's archives unearthed the following correspondence?

Queen's-Move Text, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most words are queen-graphable; each different letter can be placed on a chessboard in such a way that a chess queen can spell out the word in legal moves (no jumping over one letter to reach another though). As Leonard Gordon demonstrated in the August 1996 Word Ways, one can use the same queen graph to spell out different words.