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Articles 1681 - 1710 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Diagonal-Letter Words, Eric Iverson
Diagonal-Letter Words, Eric Iverson
Word Ways
The letters AKMNVWXYZ are the only ones containing diagonal lines. Here are some of the longer words with runs of these letters (not including variants using -s, -ness, -ed, -ing, -ly, etc.).
London Underground (Tube) Names, Darryl Francis
London Underground (Tube) Names, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
My name has appeared over articles in Word Ways since its initial appearance in the late 1960s. Between then and now my name has appeared over eight different addresses, six of them in or near the outskirts of London. After I had finally settled in the country of Cumbria in early 2004, I decided to tackle a project that had been a vague idea for a number of years, one that would link in with my longtime London residency.
A Quantitative Approach To Interestingness, A. Ross Eckler
A Quantitative Approach To Interestingness, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
In "Good Grief!" in the November 1973 Word Ways, Merlin X. Houdini IV (a pseudonym of Dmitri Borgmann) stated his Fundamental Axiom of Logology: "All words and all names tantalize with their interest, if you but perceive them correctly". He illustrated this with an analysis of the names of the 15 largest US cities. He repeated this claim under his own name in "The Keystone of Logology" in February 1977, illustrating it with twenty words from the 1974 Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary.
Word Groups, Simon Norton
Word Groups, Simon Norton
Word Ways
When I read Daniel Austin's article "Can All Words Be Expressed as Sumagrams?" in the May 2004 Word Ways, I thought to myself that his results could have been obtained without needing the ability to rearrange the letters of a word. Let me discuss this in terms of the mathematical underpinning of his article.
Word Weaves, Steven Kahan
Word Weaves, Steven Kahan
Word Ways
When the letters in the odd positions of a word appear alphabetized, we say that the word is odd-ascending; when these letters appear reverse alphabetized, we call the word odd-descending. Similarly, we refer to works as even-ascending or even-descending when the letters that occupy their even positions are alphabetized or reverse alphabetized, respectively.
Constrained Pyramids, Susan Thorpe
Constrained Pyramids, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Word pyramids, in which a letter is added at each step and the letters rearranged, will be familiar to the readers of Word Ways. The aim has been the construct a pyramid with as long a base word as possible, ideally with all words from a single dictionary.
The Prime Ministers, More Or Less, Jim Puder
The Prime Ministers, More Or Less, Jim Puder
Word Ways
The names of the American presidents have been transposed in various ways in at least three Word Ways articles, but to my knowledge no such attention has heretofore been accorded the names of their British counterparts, the prime ministers. To address this oversight, offered below is a table of metatransposals (i.e., transdeletions and transadditions) of British prime ministerial surnames similar to the one of the surnames of U.S. presidents offered in my August 1998 article, "The Presidents, More or Less."
Vicinal And Nonvicinal Heterograms, Eric Iverson
Vicinal And Nonvicinal Heterograms, Eric Iverson
Word Ways
A vicinal, as defined in Dave Morice's The Dictionary of Wordplay, is a word in which each letter has an alphabetic neighbor; that is, each letter in the word occupies a position in the alphabet next to another letter that appears in the word. (The term was created by Eugene Ulrich in the August 1983 Kickshaws.) Let us write the alphabet in a circle, regarding A and Z as alphabetic neighbors as well. Here is a collection of heterograms words with no repeated letters that are vicinals.
Going Home, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Going Home, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Word Ways
It is not surprising to Americans, the object of whose national game is "to get home" (according to comedian Gorge Carlin), that the word home enters much into the language. Can you identify how the word appears in our expression?
Bananagrams 22, Edmund Conti
Bananagrams 22, Edmund Conti
Word Ways
Bananagrams - anagrams to drive you bananas - consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve it.
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
Poisonwood Palindromes, Jeff Grant
Poisonwood Palindromes, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
Barbara Kingsolver's best-selling novel The Poison Bible was published in 1998. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Congo in 1959. One of his twin daughters, Adah, was born with hemiplegia (paralysis on one side) and is believed to be slightly brain-damaged.
Magic Word Squares: A Challenge
Magic Word Squares: A Challenge
Word Ways
Word Squares, as WW readers know, are square stacks of equal-length words that read the same across and down -- or a different set of words across and down in the case of the much rarer double word squares or blankless crosswords. Magic Squares on the other hand are square stacks of numbers where each row, column and diagonal adds up to the same sum.
Alphanumerically Truthful Equations, Rex Gooch
Alphanumerically Truthful Equations, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
In W2004-202, Anil re-introduced the equation 11 + 2 = 12 + 1. Not only is this obviously true in this numeric form, but when written ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE, the sum of the letter values on the left (taking A = 1 etc) equals the sum of the letter values on the right, viz 121. In this case, it is because the same letters are used on both sides.
Don Quixote Pangrams, A. Ross Eckler
Don Quixote Pangrams, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
When listeners to Will Shortz's "Weekend Edition Sunday" program on National Public Radio in September 2002 were asked to construct pangrams with the name of a famous person, they found Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, jointly containing three of the four rarest letters (all but J) irresistible. Here is a collection of their efforts.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Dealy Deli Specials, Doctor Duck
Dealy Deli Specials, Doctor Duck
Word Ways
Down here a "deli" is a small neighbourhood grocery cum sandwich bar and usually a bit of a general store. The shop window on the back cover illustrates ours. We've bribed the editor into letting us offer you yet more of our specials below. Send your orders c/o the editor. Remember our motto "NEVER FEAR, BUT IT HERE! WE DON'T DILLY DELI AROUND." (Please to blame my suppliers for the shocking number of atrocious puns among the bold. brand names.)
Letter Banks Of The Capitals, Will Nediger
Letter Banks Of The Capitals, Will Nediger
Word Ways
Recently, Darryl Francis found words from the letter banks of the chemical elements and the states of the US. I decided to letter-bank (to coin a verb) the names of the nations of the world, but I found that, on average, their capitals had shorter names that their countries. I used a Scrabble-based (North American vocabulary only) program similar to LeXpert to letter-bank the national capitals.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 4
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 4
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Elementary Combinations, Darryl Francis
Elementary Combinations, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
In school and college, we learnt that chemical elements combine with each other to form new substances, compounds, in very well-defined ways, obeying certain scientific rules. For example, we learned that two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen combine to form a molecule of water, and that one atom of sulfur combines with four atoms of oxygen to form a sulphate radical with electrical charge -2. In chemistry these rules of combination were explained in terms of valence and bonds, and in physics the rules were explained in terms of rings of electrons and the numbers of electrons …
Mananagrams
Word Ways
I sorely miss Ed Conti's "Bananagrams" (May '98-May '03) and offer a weak echo and tribute, Mananagrams--anagrams to put [you] off till tomorrow. Instead of rhymes, they offer sentences in which one or two (2) words are replaced by anagrams. It's up to you to figure out which and what. Most are obvious to easy but some are not easy, so all the given in Answers and Solutions at the back of this issue.
"Demi Ran, Nan," Anna Rimed, Jim Puder
"Demi Ran, Nan," Anna Rimed, Jim Puder
Word Ways
Although end-to-end-palindromic verse that is also rhyming and metrical was pioneered by J.A. Lindon and Howard Bergerson more than three decades ago, very long examples of the form have hitherto occurred only in a short story by George Marvill. Such compositions are not, however, infeasible in reality; the one that follows, in fact, is about twice as long as the longest such effort imagined by Marvill. More challenging than lengthiness in this verse is sensibility, which is courted here mainly at the quatrain level.
"Is Anal Retentive Hyphenated?": Self-Referential Humor, Don Hauptman
"Is Anal Retentive Hyphenated?": Self-Referential Humor, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
You know about self-referential statements. The classic examples are the Greek logical paradoxes. The Epimenides Paradox, in one variant, asserts: "This sentence is false." For millennia, philosophers have struggled to determine what such bafflers mean, if indeed they have any meaning at all.
Shakespeare And Psalm 46, Once More, Robert F. Fleissner
Shakespeare And Psalm 46, Once More, Robert F. Fleissner
Word Ways
In the 1961 Dover reprint of C. C. Bombaugh's Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, Martin Gardner comments in his Notes (pages 263).
More Purple Turtles (Part 2), Rex Gooch
More Purple Turtles (Part 2), Rex Gooch
Word Ways
I found more than one-half million Purple Turtles, introduced by Dan Tilque in the August 2004 Word Ways. UX produced the fewest substitutions (41), followed by EX (47). Some are interesting, e.g. ANTHEA/VNTHEA (th is a thorn, in a quotation from c.900), while others contain at least one common English word, e.g. AURA/QURQ (Jabal Qurq Sharaf in Syria), ARENA/ZRENZ (Ayn Zrenz in Tunisia) or AERAE/VERVE (as in Aerae Christi = AD).
More Purple Turtles (Part 1), Susan Thorpe
More Purple Turtles (Part 1), Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Dan Tilque's The Purple Turtle in the August 2004 issue demonstrated that some of the simplest ideas are often the most appealing. There are 325 possible substitutions (not 375), and Dan listed 224 of these (not 277). Extending the search to include the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (oed), etc., and locations other than US place names, I managed to fill at the gaps.
Definitive Anagrams: G-I
Word Ways
Continued from the May and November 2003 Word Ways (03-91,279). Verbs are capitalized and punctuated as if sentences unless they also work as nouns etc.