Digital Commons Network^™

Four Anagram Challenges, Hearst Sill Rogers

Word Ways

In the November 1981 Word Ways, Eric Albert suggested four short phrases for readers to rearrange into apposite expressions. Six readers responded with one or more examples: Len Elliott of Auburn WA, Jeremy Morse of London, England, Anthony Sebastian of San Francisco CA, David Schulman of New York NY, Edward R. Wolpow of Brookline MA and Jeff Grant of Hastings, New Zealand.

Strange Origins, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Etymologies are strange and uncertain things. Does the game of TENNIS get its naame from the French tenez 'hold on', or from Tinnis, a place in Lower Egypt which makes cloth such as covers tennis balls? Nobody knows. (However, French did give us LOVE, from l'oeuf 'the egg', drawn like a zero.) With the examples that follow, you can be sure that the modern English word derives from the rather odd ball of thread I give you to trace the word back to its origin. How many of the 25 word origins can you decipher (another word related to zero)? …

Acronyms Of Ailment, Willard R. Epsy

Word Ways

Profanity, obscenity and violence are slipping into medical terminology and phraseology unobtrusively through the back door of the acronymal abbreviation. When quoted as an acronym, coronary artery disease becumes an insulting CAD, secondary carcinoma of the upper mediastinum turns into SCUM, thyroid uptake gradient transforms into THUG, and right atrial pressure elevation transmutes into RAPE. Medical papers abound in such vulgarisms as GIP (gonorrheal invasive peritonitis), HOG (hepatic output of glucose), IMP (idiopathic myeloid proliferation) and HOOD (hyperbaric oxygen ongoing delivery).

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions for the puzzles in this issue.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors who wish to contribute to Word Ways.

Kickshaws, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 16 Number 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information including a table of contents.

Digital Verse, John Henrick

Word Ways

The English poets have taken an amiguous posture with regard to digital verse. On the one hand, they appear to delight in referring to the product of their craft as "numbers". Examples abound. In A Psalm of Life Longfellow wrote,

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!

Homophony, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

A homophone is a word or phrase pronounced like another word or phrase, but different in meaning and possibly in derivation as well, as DONE/DUN or BITE/BIGHT/BYTE. Not long ago, I realized that a large number of homophones could be constructed on the word ROSES, particularly if punctuation as well as spelling were used to distinguish among the various examples:

-the presence or absence of a capital letter, as illustrated by the girl's name (Rose) and the flower (rose)
-the presence or absence of an apostrophe, as in a simple plural (roses), the genitive of a singular noun (Rose's), and …

No-Dictionary Scrabble Revisited, Stephen C. Root

Word Ways

In the November 1974 Word Ways, Ralph Beaman constructed a Scrabble game scoring 5609 points, assuming that any combination of letters formed a word. Using the diagram below, Stephen Root devised a game scoring 5874 points. By rearranging Stephen Root's moves, Charles F. Brown of Albuquerque raised the score two more points, to 5876.

Words On Triangular Pavements, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In an earlier Word Ways article, I constructed a variety of 'hexword' patterns by inscribing letters in individual hexagonal tiles to form three-letter words for each group of tiles meeting at a common point. This article considers the analogous problem for pavements of equilateral triangles. Six adjacent triangular tiles form a hexagon with rays meeting at a central point; thus, letters inscribed on these tiles can be combined to form six-letter words arranged around this point.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.

Naming The Animals, Rufus T. Strohm

Word Ways

The following logological fable is one of a series written by Rufus T. Strohm, editor of the National Puzzlers League from 1923 to 1953. It was originally published in The Enigma in the December 1943 issue.

An Anagram Composing Contest, Eric Albert

Word Ways

With the exception of palindromes, anagrams are the most difficult kind of word puzzle to compose. The base phrase and the anagram must contain exactly the same letters, and the anagram must be apposite. The criteria for a "perfect" anagram are much stricter still: the anagram must agree in tense and number, precisely describe the base, and contain no filler such as exclamations, unrelated proper names, or irrelevant adjectives.

The Highest N-Move Scrabble Scores, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

The May 1982 Kickshaws presented a two-move SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game by Gyles Brandreth scoring 314 points and 348 points. Darryl Francis, the Kickshaws editor, wondered whether further improvement might be possible, and generalized the problem to the highest n-move Scrabble game.

Business English?, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

"Business English" was once a term for simple, no-frills communication, English with its sleeves rolled up for action. Now it means obfuscatory circumlocutions pussyfooting periphrasis, "and etc.," to use a phrase I keep encountering in the writing of MBAs. Let's see if you are executive timber, middle-management material. Can you create business jargon to substitute for each of these simple phrases? Some suggestions appear in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

The Monosyllable Machine (Part 3), Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

"Ah," sighed the furry phascolome after a few atavistic gruntlets upon degustation of the emerald cake masterpiece, "we owe a lot to the Crusaders!"

A Palindromic Alphabetic Insertion, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

An alphabetic insertion occurs when each letter of the alphabet is inserted in turn in the same position within an n-letter word, forming 26 new words of length n+1. Alphabetic insertions are extremely difficult to find, even for the simplest case in which letters are in tern inserted in the center of a two-letter word. As a practical matter, the only alphabetic insertions with any hope of success are those in which the original word consists of two vowels; letting x and y stand for vowels, the 26 words sought are of the form xay, xby, xcy, …

Three Word Square Contests (Part 1), Helen Motamen

Word Ways

About two years ago when I was nine years old and my brother Mark was eleven, we teamed up to enter a series of three contests for kids under twelve sponsored by my Girl Scout magazine, Daisy.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, correction, and comments about earlier articles appearing in Word Ways. Comments received up to a month prior to publication of an issue will appear in that issue.

Soap Dealers And Beer Barons, Eugene J. Ulrich

Word Ways

I've been suffering from an inferiority complex ever since reading about that 15-letter Finnish palindrome for a soap-dealer, SAIPPUAKAUPPIAS. Surely the English language can come up with something longer than the 7-letter ROTATOR, REPAPER or DEIFIED. (Yes, I know of the 9-letter MALAYALAM and the 11-letter KINNIKINNIK variant, but these are both borrowed words from non-European languages.)

The Poet's Corner

Word Ways

From time to time, Word Ways receives a variety of short poems related to recreational linguistics, some original, others previously published. As poetic output cannot be easily predicted, these will be presented on an irregular basis.

676 Bigrams, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

One Sunday in 1953, Cornell students Doub McIlroy and Bob Vanderhoek, weary of solving crossword puzzles, decided to try a different word game -- that of finding examples of words containing each of the 676 bigrams from AA (bazaar) to ZZ (puzzle). More than a decade later, Doug posted the incomplete list on a Bell Telephone Laboratories bulletin board in the mathematics department, asking for help in filling the gaps. Ed Gilbert, another Bell Labs employee, had recently acquired a computer-generated list of all tetragrams appearing in words in Webster's Second Edition; using clues provided by this he was eventually …

A Ten-Letter Tautonym List, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The article "Unsolved Problems" in the February 1973 Word Ways posed the problem of constructing a tautonymic 10-by-10 word square consisting entirely of words, names and terms taken from books published since 1950. Dmitri Borgmann and I joined together for three months during the spring of 1973 to search for a sufficient number of tautonyms to make the construction of such a word square possible. Originally, we thought that at least 1000 tautonyms would be needed, but we were able to compose two 10-by-10 squares from a list of only 350 tautonyms.

Kickshaws, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Shall-Will, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

Ancient Teutonic, a highly inflected language, probably had a future tense for its verbs. But the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes seem to have lost it by the time they invaded the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries. The closest they came to speaking of the future was such statements as "I go tomorrow".

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of the issue, including instructions for authors.

Proverb Shrinkage, Helen Gunn

Word Ways

In "Compression of English Text" in the May 1982 Word Ways, the editor showed how one can sometimes reconstruct text from which half the letters have been removed. If one knows that the text is a proverb, far less clueing is necessary. How little? In the following quiz, I have given the initial letters of the first three words, followed by the number of words in the phrse, such as TEB (6) = the early bird catches the worm, or OOS (6) = out of sight, out of mind. Notice that once cannot omit the third initial letter, for then …

The Tetrahedron Game, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the November 1978 Word Ways, Mary J. Hazard introduced a word game by Dave Silverman in which two players alternately assign letters to the vertices of a cube with the objective of forming four-letter words on the vertices of each face. Specifically, a player loses the game if he is unable to form words on all faces on which his letter fills in the last open vertex. If this never occurs, then the player who fills in the last open vertex on the cube wins the game.