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Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Beyond Agamemnon, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

An Agamemnon word consists of three triplets, each of which is a palindrome, as in Aga-mem-non. This article explores what happens as the number and size of triplets is varied.

Definitive Anagrams: J-L

Word Ways

Continued from the November 2004 Word Ways. Because of the large number of new pre-J catch-up words this article rightly should be called "A-L". But no, tradition prevails over logic yet again, the three previous articles being A-C, D-F, and G-I.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Two Early Palindromic Peoms By "Caliban", Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

Hubert Phillips, English crossword puzzle and logic puzzle constructor, created at least two palindromic poems. The first one was featured in Bergerson's Palindromes and Anagrams (page 94); it originally appeared in the Dogberry column in the London News Chronicle for Oct 16 1942. The second poem is found in the same column for May 1 1941.

Traveling Around The Ouija Board, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

Supposedly guided by spirits form another world, the planchette glides from letter to letter on a Ouija board, spelling out words. One can characterize the difficulty of a word by the distance that planchette must travel to spell the words (visiting the letters in the order of their appearance in the word). The table below gives the shortest-travel and the longest-travel words of various lengths, in pixels using the Ouija board.

Larger Letter Trees, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In Word Ways 2005-103ff., Eric Iverson presented some 4-letter trees, and some trees with 5-letter words. As invited by the editor, I take up the search from there. Throughout, I assume that all words in a tree must be different. The reader should sympathize if there are any errors, for tracing a vast number of almost identical words through many trees is even worse than proofreading word ladders, and repeatedly reminded me of the famous motif from Zork: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike".

620 7x7 Squares With Geographical Palindromes, Zoran Radisavljevic

Word Ways

It is not easy to make a 7x7 palindromic square with common words as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. In Serbia, puzzlers have made 10-15 such squares, all with some unusual terms like the title of a book, or the name of a person or geographical place. With the help of atlases and the Internet, we can make even some thematic palindrome squares. Most of these interesting places I found on the Dan Tilque site.

Palindromy's Unseen "Virtual Verse", Jim Puder

Word Ways

A surprising and little-recognized property of rhyming, end-to-end palindromic verse is that, contrary to intuition, the order of the lines in such verse may often be transposed in a number of ways without loss of either rhyme or palindromicity. Such line-order permutations can (a) preserve both the verse's original rhyme and palindromicity schemes, (b) change its rhyme scheme, (c) change its palindromicity scheme or (d) change both its rhyme and palindromicity schemes.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

What's In A Phrase?, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

We all use phrases without a second thought or glance. Many of these word liaisons, however, are host to a world of hidden words and hidden letter patterns. Some of these are now about to be exposed. The phrases under scrutiny here are mostly, but not exclusively, 2-word affairs.

Substitute-Letter Transposals Of Aeinrst, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Earlier issues of Word Ways have demonstrated the fecundity of the seven-letter group AEINRST when it comes to transposals. My August 1998 article offered 155 transposals of these letters, a November 1999 Colloquy added a further four transposals, and my February 2000 article offered another 23 transposals found on the Internet. There were 181 transposals in all in those three items; RE-SATIN was included as a coinage in the original 155, and confirmed as a genuine word in the 23 Internet transposals.

Wysiwyg Words For Scrabble Players, John Holgate

Word Ways

The Swiss author Max Frisch once observed 'The truth is the best camouflage - nobody believes it'. Recently at a suburban Scrabble club meeting the truth of that observation was brought home to me. I opened my game against a neophytic player with AI. 'Hang on a tick' he exclaimed. 'What does that mean?' 'It's the three-toed Brazilian sloth.' By way of demonstration I jumped up and cavorted about the room yelling 'Ah-ee, ah-ee, ah-ee', beating my chest and scratching my armpits like an ai might do. My opponent folded his arms in disbelief. 'Yeah right. As if. I happen …

Dalend Talent: Dutch Purple Turtles, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

I call these pairs "Dalend Talent" (decreasing talent) as there are quite a few too-easy examples.

Card Deck Wordplay, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

There are thirteen playing card names consisting of 52 letters: TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN JACK QUEEN KING ACE. What sort of wordplay is possible with these? To begin with, there is a crossword challenge-to arrange the words in a standard crossword array, in a rectangle of minimum size. Here is a 9x10 example that can possibly be improved.

Spoonertoons 2: We're Punning For Resident, Don Hauptman, Jim Siergey

Word Ways

Our first "Spoonertoons" collaboration appeared one year ago, in the August 2004 Word Ways. The positive response was so overwhelming (well, uh, the barista at Don's favorite coffee bar liked "Heed the Foamless!") that we decided a sequel was in order. Herewith, sore of the maim-that is: more of the same.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Half And Half Words, A. Ross Eckler, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

In the May 2005 Kickshaws, Dave Morice showed how VIOLET is a very unusual word: its letters are half vowels and half consonants, half from the first half of the alphabet and half from the last half, etc. In an attempt to find out how unusual this word is, compared with other English words, we propose the following ten rules for dividing the alphabet into two parts.

368,435,456 Sonnet Anagrams, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Pick a line at random from the four in the first group, a line from the four in the second group, and so on, to create a Shakespearean sonnet with rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Repeat this process to create a second sonnet that is a line-by-line anagram of the first. There are some other mild constraints: the four lines in the second group mention the four seasons, and there are minor allusions to other poems. The lines were constructed to make each sonnet say something reasonably coherent (vaguely having to do with the current world situation).

English In Foreign Dress, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

Now that English of one short or another (America, British, etc.) is the whole world's second language, it seems only natural that English words are incorporated into foreign speech. Just as we borrowed from the French their concepts and their words (nuance, restaurants, etc.) so speakers of languages other than English borrow from us.

Headshots And Footprints, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

If you view the tops of capital sans serif letters, they can be divided into several categories, listed at the left below. The same thing can be done with letter bottoms, at the right.

Dutch Number-Names Are Interesting Too, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

Editor's Note: In the November 1998 Word Ways, Dave Morice defined unique properties for each of the first 99 number-names. THe following is a translation of Getalnamen on page gn of Battus Opperlans! Taal- & letterkunde (Querido, 2003). Analogous English-language records, if they exist, are given in brackets at the end.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Aeiou(Y) Together, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The reader might be forgiven for thinking that the subject of AEIOU(Y) words had been exhausted. There exists, however, at least one aspect of AEIOU(Y) which remains incomplete. There appears to have been no specific search for words in which the 5(6) vowels AEIOU(Y) occur as an unbroken group, in any order.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Smynonyms Or Definitive Palindromes

Word Ways

A definitive palindrome consists of a word or phrase plus its definition (loosely speaking) which together form a palindrome, like Susan Thorpe's diary -- yr. aid (97-186). The ideal case is a pair of synonymic reversals like pat-tap, the first to appear in Word Ways (74-172). Such reversals deserve a palindromic name. I offer "smynonyms" -- SyMmetrical sYNONYMS, or, in anagrams, M synonyms, the M representing symmetry -- M mystery in the palindromes -- I "M" as splendor.

The Eleven Square - Take Two, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This is the first 11-square I have found by entirely automatic means. It took as long as finding a thousand 10-squares. In finding this square, 200,000 million squares complete in the first four rows had to be discarded, including 84000 squares complete to midway or later in the last row.

A Foul Ghoul Soul Loves Good Blood Food, Richard Lederer, Bob Mckenty, Alexian Gregory

Word Ways

The answer is that each line ends with a word that looks like it rhymes with another word or other words in the poem but when sounded out, they don't. Such words are called eye rhymes, that the viewer of these eye-dentities must focus on the replication of letters that appear in the final syllable in each of two or more words and ignore the placement of stress.

Light Verse For The Logologist, John Newton

Word Ways

A wit told a tale

Where a whale comes ashore,

Being somehow confused by the tide and the fog,

Was bagged by a fisherman,

Secured aft and fore,

And left in the guard of his tail-wagging dog.

Vowel Swap Transposals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

TRAILS-TRIALS and MANTEL-MENTAL ARE EXAMPLES OF 6-LETTER VOWEL SWAP TRANSPOSALS (VSTs), the 2 vowels swapping places and the 4 consonants remaining in situ. Here, I search for 6-letter VSTs having 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 vowels respectively, all the vowels changing places with other vowels. Previous items on letter swap transposals (WW91038, 91089, 91252) deal solely with swapping 2 letters according to their positions in a word: e.g. 3-6 CANTOR-CARTON and 5-6 ALBION-ALBINO, irrespective of whether the 2 letters are consonants, vowels or one of each.