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Mighty Like A Mule, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

Compound words result from the union of two or more simple words. They can be phrasal compounds like 'nevertheless' or or fused compounds like 'smog' (smoke and fog). Many books on linguistics mention hybrid words: compound words whose simplex components come from different languages. The usual example given is 'automobile', with the Greed-derived auto and the Latin-derived mobile. Other names for these include mongrel words or mule words.

Floral Eponyms, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

In a way, flowers talk, or at least 'communicate'. Their color and fragrance more or less 'speak' to animals: the daisy, for instance, by absorbing all ultraviolet light except at the tips of the petals, presents (from the point of view of the bee the flower is trying to attract) a lit-up airfield with a ring of tiny illuminations around the dark target on which the bee can zero in. Speaking of flowers, why don't you zero in on the names of these flowers, all derived from personal names?

Crossword Puzzle Letter Frequencies, John D. Hitchcock

Word Ways

In 500 crossword puzzles syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association, and published in the "Laramie Daily Boomerang" six days a week between October 24, 1976 and June 11, 1978 (about 20 consecutive months), the number of times each letter of the alphabet was used was tabulated. The statistical results are summarized in the table on the next page, and discussed in more detail below.

Nim Aid, Idi Amin, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Ever since he came to power in 1971, the Ugandan director Idi Amin has attracted considerable publicity, mostly adverse. As Robert Funt points out in the November 1977 Word Ways, this tyrant is of special interest to palindromists. The time seems right for a short logological analysis of IDI AMIN.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections, 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.

Telephomnemonics, Boris Randolph

Word Ways

The editor recently pointed out, in answer to a suggestion of mine that involved dialing names on the telephone, that it would be nice to have something like dialing 9288 to reach Mr. Watt. With this in mind, grab for your telephone and see who you can reach (posthumously, like Watt, of course) with the following numbers. A clue is given with each number; for a harder challenge, cover these with a sheet of paper and work with the digits alone. Answers are found in the Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Onomasticon Ii, George H. Scheetz

Word Ways

Little did I envision the difficulties encountered in building a list of -cide words. In general, such words are a combined form, signifying 'killer' or 'killing' (from the Latin caedere, to cut or kill). There are, however, three groups of exceptions: (1) development from other, similar roots; (2) neologisms, many of which are nonsensical; and (3) accidents of etymology.

A Word Stair Contest, Roger Hannahs

Word Ways

A sequence of letters forms a word stair if each set of n consecutive letters in it forms a word: for example, a 16-space word stair of three letter words is WASHERAYETAGEMUD (was, ash, she, ... , emu, mud) from the May 1970 Kickshaws. In its May/June 1978 issue, the magazine Games sponsored a contest based on a generalization of the word stair. It allowed words of any length and any degree of overlap to be formed out of the letter sequence: for example, a 12-space generalized word stair is WORDUPSTAIRS (word, dups, upstair, stairs). More specifically, the contst objective …

A Sampler Of Long Words, Rudolf Ondrejka

Word Ways

A list of long words.

Front Cover And Publication Information

Word Ways

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

Terminal Bigrams, Philip M. Cohen

Word Ways

This article reports progress on what I call the '1352 Problem': finding words that begin or end with each of the 676 possible two-letter combinations. Earlier results are given in Dmitri Borgmann's 'Zero Redundancy!' in his book Beyond Language (Problem 137), Darryl Francis's 'Zero Redundancy Rides Again' in the August 1970 Word Ways, and my 'Initial Bigrams' and 'Final Bigrams' in the May and August 1975 Word Ways.

A Thirteen-Letter Positional List, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

A number of Word Ways readers have shown a marked interest in words in which the central letter ranged through the alphabet from A to Z, and the letter groups on both sides of the central letter also formed bona fide words. John Meyer looked at seven-letter words in the May 1978 issue; Leslie Card extended the study to nine-letter words in the August 1978 issue; Jeff Grant and Roger Hannahs continued on to eleven-letter words in the November 1978 issue.

Kickshaws, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Very Large Numbers, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In modern times, mathematicians have thought about very large numbers, and have invented names for them. Articles on this subject appeared in the February and May 1968 issues of Word Ways.

Twice In Fivers, Ralph G. Beaman

Word Ways

In a continuation of my studies on alphabetical letters in five-letter words (see the May 1978 Kickshaws and "From AB--- to ---YZ" in the November 1978 issue) I present here an analysis of five-letter words containing each letter twice in all combinations. A glance at the tabulation will show that each letter must appear two times in each of ten words, for a total of 260 required.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

The back cover of this issue.

Compounds Compounded, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Since earliest times, speakers of English, true to the Germanic heritage of their language, have created thousands of new words by joining together two (or more) independent morphemes to form compounds. In the November 1978 Word Ways, Dmitri Borgmann's "Word Relationships" explored the various interactions between the elements in noun-noun compounds, and Maxey Brooke's "A Complex of Compounds" illuminated the complex grammar of compound words by constructing a four-by-four matrix (Noun-Adjective-Adverb-Verb) that yielded sixteen different combinations.

Alphabet-Crashing Words, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

In previous issues, Word Ways has dealt with the topic of word crashes: the occurrence of individual letters of two words in the same position in both. In this article I introduce the topic of words crashing with the alphabet -- considering the alphabet to be circular rather than linear, so that A is the next letter after Z. I also consider crashes with the alphabet written in reverse order (Z to A).

Word Ways Challenges (Part 1), Philip M. Cohen, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Word Ways has presented a great many challenges, explicit and implicit, since 1968; many were never taken up, and many are not available to newer readers. In this series of articles, we have attempted to gather them in one place.

The Waiting Game, John Mcclellan

Word Ways

To explain the title of this article, we must tell you about my friend and his wife who came to the City recently for a day's shopping. Their needs differed, as might be expected, and their stores lay in different directions. Deciding to meet at the Hail Columbia Hotel at one o'clock for lunch, they went on their respective ways.

Monoconsonantal Words, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In 1973, a reader of the British magazine Games & Puzzles wrote to me asking if anyone had ever compiled a list of the longest words using only on consonant, but several times over. The reader included ALLELUIA and ASSESSES in his letter, these being the longest "monoconsonantal" words that he knew using the letters L and S.

Front Cover And Publication Information

Word Ways

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

Yugoslav Puzzle Periodicals, Slavko Peleh

Word Ways

Riddles have been part of the folklore of the Yugoslav nations since very early times, and the first were written down at the beginning of the sixteenth century. During the nineteenth century, riddles appeared regularly in literary magazines and collections of folk riddles were published. The first modern crossword puzzle appeared in Zagreb on March 1, 1925.

Word Transposability, Darryl Francis, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The transposability of a word can be defined as the ease with which its letters can be rearranged to form another word. This can be quanitified in two ways -- the number of different words into which the letters can be rearranged, and their rarity. As demonstrated by Dmitri Borgmann in "Elementary Transpositions" in the August 1978 Word Ways, it is usually possible to transpose a word if one is willing to stretch the concept of a "word" to its outer limits (and beyond).

The Great Dictionary Quest, Warren N. Cordell

Word Ways

Why do you have a house full of old dictionaries?

What are they good for?

What do you plan to do with them?

Palindromes In The Oed, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

For some time I have been looking out for long palindromic words in the Oxford English Dictionary. I recently decided to try and find the longest palindromes in each letter of the alphabet, starting with A and working right through to Z. The results of this search are set out below. Reduplications such as TOOT-TOOT, WAW-WAW and TUT-TUT have not been included.

Logopoeia, Philip M. Cohen

Word Ways

Logopoeia (a coined word meaning 'word-coining') is a natural activity of English-language speakers; this paragraph, in fact, contains three words in addition to logopoeia that are probably not in any dictionary. But the word-coiner, if not being deliberately nonsensical, is constrained by the desire to get a message across. The practice is more suspect in logology, where the only acknowledged constraint may be the logological goal. Here it is easy to slip from coining words to coining 'words' and thence to words?.

Orthograffiti, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

With the possible exceptions of presidents, baseball commissioners, and property taxes, there is no more popular object of abuse and ridicule than our "system" of English spelling. "Spelling," declares Mario Pei, "is the world's most awesome mess." J. Donald Adams adds: "It is wildly erratic and almost wholly without logic. One needs the eye of a hawk, the ear of a dog, and the memory of an elephant to make headway against its confusions and inconsistencies."

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections, 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.