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Articles 1651 - 1680 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
It's A Sonnet (Not Sestina), Mike Keith
It's A Sonnet (Not Sestina), Mike Keith
Word Ways
Did you know that Shakespeare's 115th sonnet contains a hidden message? When the poem is formatted with the appropriate font and character spacing, as shown below, the underlined letters spell IT'S A SONNET BY W.S. The second sonnet is an anagram of Shakespeare's, and contains its own similarly-arranged message.
Letter Trees, Eric Iverson
Letter Trees, Eric Iverson
Word Ways
On March 13 2005, Will Shortz presented an interesting word puzzle on National Public Radio: rearrange the letters of K + ANALOGIES into a tree, where every path leading downward is a four-letter word. The tree at the left yields saga, sage, sane, sank, sine, sink, silk and silo.
Higher Cardinal Transposals, Darryl Francis
Higher Cardinal Transposals, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Thirty years ago, my article "Cardinal Transposals" appeared in the November 1975 Word Ways. That article presented transposals for the numbers ONE to TWENTY, and then it tens THIRTY to NINETY (omitting EIGHTY). Since then, no other transposal material has appeared for the cardinal numbers TWENTY ONE and upwards.
Cringe Binge: More Media Bloopers And Ephemera, Don Hauptman
Cringe Binge: More Media Bloopers And Ephemera, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
It's time once again for another roundup of typographical errors, linguistic lapses, and other amusing oddities in the news. First, some recently heard broadcast items.
Ventriloquism For Dummies, Dave Morice
Ventriloquism For Dummies, Dave Morice
Word Ways
The following is a dialog between a Ventriloquist and his Dummy. The Ventriloquist's words are in Roman typeface, and the Dummy's are in Italic.
Games On Nonsymmetic Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell
Games On Nonsymmetic Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell
Word Ways
The diagram below depicts a geometric configuration consisting of 16 nodes and 12 lines. Notice that each node is on exactly three lines and each line contains exactly four nodes. The fact that 3x16 = 4x12 = 48 characterizes what mathematicians would call a nonsymmetric configuration or block design of size (16,12). This one is named BRUNES' STAR.
Antarctic Words, Jeff Grant
Antarctic Words, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
The Antarctic Dictionary, A Complete Guide to Antarctic English by Bernadette Hince was published by CSIRO Publishing, Australia in 2000. This work has been meticulously researched, with more than 15,000 quotations from about a thousand different sources, giving the reader a unique insight into the language of Antarctica. The world's most isolated continent has spawned some of the most unusual words in the English language. In the space of a mere century, a remarkable vocabulary has evolved to deal with the extraordinary environment and living organisms of the Antarctic. There is even a little humour here and there!
Word Lists With All Starting Letters, A. Ross Eckler
Word Lists With All Starting Letters, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
How large must a word list be in order to have a reasonable chance of including words starting with every letter of the alphabet? Because word starting with X are far less likely to occur than others, this question essentially reduces to the probability that a word list of length n contains one or more x-words. If one draws at random n words from a much larger list in which a fraction p or more x-words, then this probability is equal to 1- (1-p)*n, where p*n is p raised to the nth power.
A Homovocalic Survey, Susan Thorpe
A Homovocalic Survey, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
A homovocalic (HV) is a word with one or more vowels, in which all the vowels are the same. ANAGRAM is a homovocalic. Originally christened 'vocalic invariants' by Dmitri Borgmann in Language on Vacation (LonV), they have been called monovocalics, sometimes univocalics, in Word Ways.
Unsuspected Presidential Vanities, Jim Puder
Unsuspected Presidential Vanities, Jim Puder
Word Ways
Suppose that until recently one traditional (if rather odd) question asked of all newly-elected or newly-seated U.S. presidents at their first press conference was this one: "Had you never entered public life, what do you think would be your chief claim to fame at this time?" (In their logologically-fancied responses that follow, the word "my" is always exogenous).
Slub Glub, Faith W. Eckler
Slub Glub, Faith W. Eckler
Word Ways
Fun and games in a logological family. From time immemorial we have deliberately mispronounced words. An example of this is the word agenda where we always emphasize the first syllable and use a hard "g." We use this word often as in "What's today's agenda?" In their words, what are the planned activities for today? I have to remember to pronounce the word correctly when I'm in the real world, lest I be thought ignorant.
Animal Crackers
Word Ways
What do the following vertebrates have in common? This is a logological puzzle, no knowledge of zoology required. If you need help, see below.
Wide Alphametics, Mike Keith
Wide Alphametics, Mike Keith
Word Ways
An alphametic, as most Word Ways readers are surely aware, is a puzzle like SEND + MORE = MONEY, in which letters are to be replaced with decimal digits to make a valid addition sum. Such puzzles were originally called "cryptarithms" and sometimes just used jumbles of letters rather than words or phrases; the term "alphametic" was introduced by J.A. H. Hunter in the 1950's for cryptarithms which use actual words.
Base Pairs, Eric Iverson
Base Pairs, Eric Iverson
Word Ways
Most people are familiar with the decimal system, in which ten different symbols (0 through 9) are used to represent numbers of any size. Our numbers are written in base 10, as distinct from base 2 which uses only the symbols 0 and 1. In base 2, the base 10 numbers 1 through 7 are rewritten as 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, and 111. In base 16 (the hexadecimal system), used by computer programmers, the six letters A through F are added to the ten digits, resulting in "numbers" like AB9F which is equivalent to 43935 in base 10.
Guggenheim Sentences, A. Ross Eckler
Guggenheim Sentences, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
In the word game Guggenheim, one selects five categories (colors, first names, cities, animals, etc.) and five random letters from the alphabet, then attempts to find examples of each category beginning with each letter. In this article, we use 25 different letters (all but X), and try to form parallel sentences, each one using words beginning with the same letter.
Heterogrammatic Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch
Heterogrammatic Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Eight-squares exist in overwhelming numbers (a few million million by my guess, and 27 million million by Chris Long's formula), so there are many 'perfect' examples. A 1902 effort by Charles B Stewart had a two-word place name and word with an initial capital: decisive egomania computes impotent sauterne interned Viennese East Eden.
Long Word Weaves, Rex Gooch
Long Word Weaves, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Word weaves were introduced by Steven Kahan in the Feb 2005 Word Ways. When the letters in the odd positions of a word appear alphabetized, we say that the word is odd-ascending and when these letters appear reverse alphabetized, we call the word odd-descending; even-ascending and even-descending are defined similarly. A word in which both the odd letters and the even letters are either ascendant or descendent is called a word weave. Here is a selection of such words of nine or more letters; all are to be found somewhere in the OED or Webster 2 except where noted.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 1
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 1
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
New Five-Letter Palindromes, Jeff Grant
New Five-Letter Palindromes, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
In "My New Pals" in the May 2003 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe exhibited a list of 459 five-letter palindromes not recorded in Palindromicon II (Jeff Grant and Dan Tilque, Word Ways Monograph Series 6, 2002). These were found on the Web using the search engine Google.
Cruel Unending Drama, Mike Keith
Cruel Unending Drama, Mike Keith
Word Ways
The poem below was composed under a double constraint, which was to encode the first 85 decimal digits of two well-known irrational numbers. Can the reader discover what those numbers are, and how they are encoded?
Sequential Words, Susan Thorpe
Sequential Words, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Readers of Word Ways are familiar with palindromes, tautonyms, Miami Words (WW200014) and Ladders Words (WW2002279). In Sequential Words, sequences of these genres, rather than entire words, are considered. The idea is to look for words made of 2 or more such sequences. The sequences which make the word may both/all be of the same genre: SUSANNA, with the letter pattern 121 3443, consists of 2 palindromic sequences - a palindromic sequence followed by a Miami Sequence.
The 11 Heterograms Of Farthalomew Splib, Fender Tucker
The 11 Heterograms Of Farthalomew Splib, Fender Tucker
Word Ways
Beads of sweat sprang out on the brow of radio personality Wally Fletch as he sat down in the front of the micophone. He knew that it he didn't read his uncle's story flawlessly, he'd lose his $100,000 inheritance and with it the hand of the only woman he'd ever loved, Miss Avigail Beutelle. What a contretemps!
The Adventures Of Word Man, Don Hauptman
The Adventures Of Word Man, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
Literacy is in a parlous state. Whether the causes lie in our educational system, the influences of the mass media, the jargon and informality of e-mail, or some other factors, I will leave to others to determine.
Lewis Carroll And Douglas Adams, Will Nediger
Lewis Carroll And Douglas Adams, Will Nediger
Word Ways
On July 4 1826 both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, precisely 50 years after signing the Declaration of Independence. The only surviving signer was Charles Carroll. On July 4 1862 Lewis Carroll first told the tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Alice Liddell.
Plane Earth Planet Packings, Jim Puder
Plane Earth Planet Packings, Jim Puder
Word Ways
The Plane Earth Study and Teaching Society wishes to thank word Ways' editor for generously granting us this opportunity to respond to his gravely misleading article in the May 2004 Word Ways entitled "Planet Packing in Two Dimensions." But before addressing that issue, we would like to acquaint the reader with our Society's basic tenets.
More Balanced Word Pairs, Rex Gooch
More Balanced Word Pairs, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Darryl Francis presented a neat idea in "Balanced Word Pairs" in the November 2004 Word Ways. I do, however, prefer a name like "complementary word pairs" because the corresponding letters in each word are the 27s-complement of each other. i do not see how the word "balanced" applies, as it does with balanced words. Darryl found just one example of length 6; I found another 150 of this length (mostly by using place names). I also found nine of length 7 (ignoring words consisting of strings of up to 23 As). The following selection of length 6 includes cases where …