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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).

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 …

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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.

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.

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.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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.

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 …

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

The Bellamy Charades, Doris Nash Wortman

Word Ways

Fifty years ago in Boston, there was a best-selling author who had been enjoying a most successful limelight for six or seven years when, to the surprise of everybody, a shy retiring brother of his - an excellent public accountant not supposed to be a writer at all - leaped with a book into a successful limelight of his own.

Nobody's News, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A few blocks form here, there lived a man named Nobody. He used to have a normal first, middle, and last name, but he officially changed all three to just one word, Nobody. When anyone asked him why, he said "I'm a nobody, like billions of other people in the world, but they're afraid to admit it."

Classic Latin Palindromes, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

In his book Literary Frivolities; Fancies, Follies, and Frolics (London, 1880), William T. Dobson related the following medieval story (taken from Hone's Everyday-Book) showing that his Satanic Majesty was a master of palindromic wordplay.

Selfish, Selfless, And Equable Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Selfish words (from 1,200 examples)

I have often been taught that I would be rude to readers if I continually used the pronoun I in sentences I wrote: I would be accused of solipsism as well as a publishing solecism. Indeed, people who are enthusiastic about political correctness might say, without even thinking (too difficult for them anyway), that one ought to avoid words with too many of the letter i.

Enlarging English Tautonyms, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In a companion article, Hugo Brandt Corstius exhibits a set of Dutch words consisting of a tautonyms to which have been added an additional letter of the alphabet in the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. This article exhibits corresponding English words drawn from Webster's Second or Third (except when noted). When the extra letter is the middle, these words were christened by John Ferguson as Heads 'n' Tails Words, and a type collection was presented by Murray Pearce in the August 1971 Word Ways (with some better examples in February 1972).

Sub-60-Letter Pangrammatic Windows, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The November 2005 Kickshaws reported the discovery of Dave Moore of a 61-letter pangrammatic window (contiguous string of letters in a published text that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once) in Bret Harte's Flip: A California Romance. Although reported as a new record, that discovery just ties the 61-letter example found in 2004 by Dan Tilque in The Detroit News and mentioned in Word Ways at the time - though it is nearly undeniable that the Bret Harte example is of higher quality, as the Detroit News window contains proper names as well as two numerals, whereas …

How To Increase Your Vocabulary

Word Ways

The easiest way to increase your vocabulary is to MAKE UP WORDS! Like the amusing "interocitor" from an old s-f movie. Here is a new way to make up words: combine prefixes and suffixes with no substantive element in between, forcing them to take on substantive roles themselves. Here are some new words of that style. The big bonus for logologists is that these may now be treated as legit words since they have appeared in print as bold entries in a linguistics journal!

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Answers To Bellamy's 500 Charades, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

For those fortunate enough to own one or more of the Bellamy books, here are the solutions to his puzzles. The answers to A Century of Charades are contained in Harland Ballard's Open Sesame, and the answers to A Second Century of Charades are contained in Re-Open Sesame. I am indebted to Will Shortz for supplying the answers to More Charades.

Elementary Transadditions, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The names of chemical elements are an interesting group of names to conjure with. First of all, there's over one hundred of them, depending on how you can count them. Secondly, there's a good mix of short names, and in-between names.

Shifts Progress, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A shift is the process which occurs when the letters of one word are all shifted the same number of steps along the alphabet (looping from Z to A) to make another word. For example OHM + 1 = PIN, whilst CHEER + 7 = jolly. Here, I refer to these as basic shifts. This article examines other types of shift in which the shift values are not all the same but which abide by various rules. Each series of shift values makes a shift pattern.

An Alphabet Reversal Verse, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most Word Ways readers are aware of alphabet poems. Nyr Indictor gave a brief history of them in the August 1995 Word Ways, citing both simple-minded one for children (popular a couple of centuries ago).

Top-Eye, The Peyote Man, Jim Puder

Word Ways

I was much impressed by Susan Thorpe's article "Constrained Pyramids" in the February issue of Word Ways. Her constrained word pyramids seems almost magically ingenious. Her creations, along with Anil's recent discussion of the impregnate-permeating anagram, inspired the keyboard doodle below. In my little transposing sailor man (to avoid copyright infringement, let's call him Top-Eye which neatly transposes to what he's got in his pipe), the makeup of a letter group changes only to add or drop letters when the word length changes.

Meaningful Offspring, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Rearranged, the letters of a parent word may give rise to two perfectly legitimate offspring. Some parent words produce pairs of offspring which are related to meaning to each other and also, in some cases, to the parent word. MUSLINETTE hides the synonyms SILENT and MUTE; BAPTISE hides the antonyms TIP and BASE; WORTHILY hides the phrase HOLY WRIT, and so on.

Letter Lengths, Eric Iverson, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Define the length of a letter as the sum of the lengths of its component straight lines and arcs (ignoring details such as serifs). Thus, the length of V is a little more than twice the length of I in most fonts, as O is greater than C, and B and R both greater than P. To fix ideas, we define the uppercase letters as a combination of straight lines and arcs of circles. Nearly all the letters can be embedded in rectangles 2 units by 1 unit in size, except for C, O, W and Q, all of which …

Frequency Heterograms

Word Ways

I. Transposals of ETAOIN SHRDLU

Etaoin shrdlu, the twelve most used English letters in order by an old count, is an entry in Webster's 3rd (W3) as the Linotype not-to-be-printed marker slug. When I noticed that malnourished misses by one letter (t) being a transposals of it I was tantalised and sought a full transposal.

A New Fourteen-Letter Transposition, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The Saturday 17 December 2005 World Wide Words (Issue 472), edited by Michael Quinion, exhibited the neologism SINISTROSPHERE: "This has started to appear online as a disparaging collective term for bloggers with left-wing political affiliations. Its opposite is the dextrosphere, a sweeter-sounding and must less sinister term. Both words are based on blogosphere, a collective term for the whole blogging environment."

Enlarging Dutch Tautonyms, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

In the table below, I present a near-complete set of Dutch words that consist of tautonyms to which have been added a single letter, either in front, in the middle, or behind. A few of the words (italicized) can be used either in the first or third column. Koekoek and wouwouw are bird names.

Brain Teaser, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

Place a new word in front of each word on this list, forming either word or a common two-word phrase. What do the 102 new words have in common? Where does LOOSE belong on this list?

Un-Truthful Words

Word Ways

Four is the definitive "truthful word" because it has four letters. "Unfour" is also truthful as it doesn't have four letters, but is untruthful as it's not a real word. Following an excursion into the un-section of the dictionary I found heaps of truthful and untruthful words, as well as some both truthful and untruthful--like unfour but real words. Here's a sampling, mostly of linguistic interest.