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Articles 1531 - 1560 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Spoonertoons 3: The "Eek!" Shall Inherit The Mirth, Don Hauptman
Spoonertoons 3: The "Eek!" Shall Inherit The Mirth, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
As an annual tradition, one we trust is much anticipated, we present a new set of original spoonerisms rendered into visual form. This is the third consecutive August issue of Word Ways in which our collaborative feature has appeared. By the way, although it's a few weeks too late to send him a card, July 22 was Dr. Spooner's 162nd birthday.
The Great Times Ten-Square Hoax, Rex Gooch
The Great Times Ten-Square Hoax, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
When i was at University, I ran my college debating society, and was contacted by the best-known columnist of one of the two serious Sunday newspapers in the UK (in the UK, the major papers are national in circulation). He told me to ring him, reversing the charges, no matter how late, to let him know the result of a particular debate. I did so, to be met with a very curt dismissal, because the vote did not support his view.
Kickshaws, David L. Silverman
Punk Whiz 2
Word Ways
Pun Quiz: what common phrases or words do these disdefinitions refer to? The numbers tell how many letters are in the words of the answer. As a clue (7/5/4) means the answer is a 16-letter word made up of elements of 7, 5, and 4 letters. My answers are at the back of this issue.
Did You Write A Shakespearean Sonnet?, A. Ross Eckler
Did You Write A Shakespearean Sonnet?, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
One can divide humanity into two groups - those who can be identified as the real author of a Shakespearean sonnet, and those who cannot. Willard Espy revealed in his book The World's Gotten Out (Clarkson Potter, 1989) the method of establishing authorship: look for the first letter of a name anywhere in the first line of a given sonnet, the second letter of the name anywhere in the second line of the same sonnet, and so on until the full name is spelled out. Sure enough, Willard Espy appears in Sonnet 114.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Palindromic Triads: Not Quite Agamemnon, Steven Kahan
Palindromic Triads: Not Quite Agamemnon, Steven Kahan
Word Ways
Logologists recognize Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War, as the only common dictionary entry that is made up of three consecutive palindromic triads. In the challenge that follows, you are asked to find twenty-seven more words that begin and end with a palindromic triad.
Adeginr Aehlmops
Word Ways
"Reading Alphomes" is the above title in alphomes: the letters of each word are alphabetized. The following paragraph recently made the rounds on the i-net and partly inspired this essay. (The rest of this page is translated in Answers and Solutions at the back of this issue.)
Reversible Seven-Squares, Rex Gooch
Reversible Seven-Squares, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
A reversible word square is one in which every row can be read backwards, and every column upwards - see especially the examples in the second section below. Every word must be either a reversible word such as REVILER (RELIVER in reverse) or a palindrome, which is a special kind of reversible word. In this article, the term reversible word does not include palindromes. In general, counts include valid rotations and reflections.
My Best Canadian Place Name Transadditions, Darryl Francis
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.
Joaquin Through The Pangram Window, Eric Chaikin
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".
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 39 Issue 2
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 39 Issue 2
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
The Best Ten-Squares, Jeff Grant
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.
I'M (Alas!) A Salami, Win Emmons
I'M (Alas!) A Salami, Win Emmons
Word Ways
Many additional palindromes can be found on my website http://www.palindromania.com.
All-Diagonal Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch
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!
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
The Generation Game, Susan Thorpe
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.
Some Really Unusual Words, Leonard R. N. Ashley
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.
Omitted Letters In Crosswords, Jeremy Morse
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 …
New Partridge Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English, Robert Cass Keller
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.
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.
Letter And Word Frequencies, Rex Gooch
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.
"Sending A Clear Mixed Signal" Still More Amusing Bloopers And Anomalies, Don Hauptman
"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.
Internal Isomorphs, Susan Thorpe
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.
Ambidextrous And Antidextrous Words, Rex Gooch
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.
Wordplay In Astronomy, Mark Isaak
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.
Embedding Many Words In Pi, A. Ross Eckler
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.
Shakespeare's Pangrammatic Sonnet, A. Ross Eckler
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 …
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.
The Ascent Of Man, Rex Gooch
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.