Digital Commons Network^™

Euler Path Words, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

The 26 capital letters of the alphabet can be topologically viewed as simple networks - collections of links joined by nodes. Nodes are classified by the number of links that meet there. A well-known theorem in graph theory states that a network contains as Euler Path (a path that traverses the network, once only along each link) if and only if it has at most two nodes with an odd number of links. (This theorem was once used by Euler to prove that one could not traverse the seven bridges of Konigsberg without repeating one or more of them.)

Super Heavyweights (Part 1), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In "A Challenge Answered" in the May 1995 Word Ways. Darryl Francis responded to a challenge of Tom Pulliam to assign words to all the numbers from 1 upwards, using the letter sum of words (A=1, B=2, etc.). He reached 250, microminiaturisation, but missed 249. In "Extending Francis" in August 1995, the editor collated responses from various contributors to fill that gap, extending the unbroken run to 354. In the February 1997 Word Ways, I gave words matching numerical palidnromes, adding 3693, 373, 383, 393, 434, 454, 474, and 484. In the august 1998 Word Ways, I gave many dense …

Roman Ways, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Wordplay based on Roman Numeral Letters (RNLs) is not new to Word Ways. Here, however, I attempt an overview of the subject, as well as introducing a variety of new RNL wordplay. As a whole, RNL wordplay can be divided conveniently into two types: non-numerical and numerical.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Balanced Word Pairs, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Given the 26 letters in the alphabet, the midpoint lies between the 13th and 14th letters, M and N, Imagine a process which can take a word and each of its letters and transform the words into a different string of letters, such that the letter A is changed to a Z, the letter B is changed to a Y, a C to an X, and so on, with M being changed to an N. Here, the midpoint of the alphabet acts like the fulcrum of balance, with the original word and the transformed string of letters pivoted equally. As …

Letters Of The Presidents, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The 37 different surnames of US presidents can be compared with each other in many different ways. This paper looks at them in one, two, and three dimensions - along a line, on a plane, and in space, showing which ones are neighbors and which ones are outliers.

Baseball-O-Grams, Universagrams, J. Patrick Lewis

Word Ways

OH, C'MON, HAPPINESS IS A championship season

SHOESTRING CATCH gosh, I can stretch!

WORLD SERIES SEATS? seats were sold, sir

NO-HITTER then riot

Triplets, Jeremiah Farrell, Karen Farrell

Word Ways

TRIPLETS is a new puzzle-game we play with the help of our four good friends S A M TORCHE, ENOS TRIMBACH, NORWICH BUMSTEAD and INA CHOWBLY DUMPSTER. Readers may remember Norwich and Ina from our article "Magic Square Magic" in the May 2000 issue of Word Ways but Sam and Enos are recent acquaintances.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Who Murdered Roger?, John E. Connett

Word Ways

This continuation of the Reg-and-Roger theme (see the May 2004 Word Ways) is centered on murder. Some of the illustrious suspects are Nero, Peter Lorre, Errol Flynn and Aldo Ray, but I think Emil or Iris did it!

A Further Modified Ten-Square, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The original ASTRALISED ten-square in the November 1990 Word Ways, and the modified DISTALISED square in February 2002. Inspired by Rex Gooch's recent groundbreaking discoveries, I have no further modified this square. The latest effort is an interesting mix of old and new. There are only two proper names, a place and a person, both American. Everything else is uncapitalized and, with one exception, solid-form. Every item in the square comes from America or Britain, and they can all be found either on the Internet (using the Google search program), or in major English-language references.

Are All Words Interesting

Word Ways

In the February '77 Word Ways (77-8), Dmitri Borgmann proposed as the keystone of logology that all words are logologically interesting, illustrating with twenty random words. Pamela Brang provided seventeen more examples by the same method (77-163). But thirty-seven out of some half a million words is not proof.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

The Purple Turtle, Dan Tilque

Word Ways

The PURPLE TURTLE is a magical beast. With one glance, it turns an ABBEY into an ALLEY, reduces a BULB to PULP, makes a VESSEL into a VASSAL, and converts a MUMMY to a PUPPY. By turning POMP into a BOMB, MONACO becomes a MENACE. And from TAMPA to TEMPE, it turns KODAK into SODAS. It's enough to give an ENGINE ANGINA.

Malaproverbs, Neo-Adages, Wrongerisms

Word Ways

Over the years Word Ways has occasionally published humorous variations of traditional proverbs or conventional phrases. In February 1972 Philip Cohen demonstrated that certain proverbs alter their message if the last few words are removed ("People who live in glass houses shouldn't"). In November 1975 Mary Youngquist and Harry Hazard created new proverbs by removing a phrase and inserting another in an existing one.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Wharf Air (Warfare), Jerome Tietz

Word Ways

Fly on the pane,

In tent, on the ceiling of my site.

Raining in the garden of bushes leaving.

Spoonertoons, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

At some undetermined stage of my lifelong fascination with spoonerisms. I realize that the genre is ideally suited to visualization. Cruel and Usual Puns, my semi-successful 1991 spoonerism book, was superbly illustrated by top New Yorker cartoonist Arnie Levin. But since then, aside form my own occasional amateur sketches for friends. I haven't fully explored or exploited the potential of this perfect marriage of word and image.

Twin Places And Other Top Anagrams, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The trigger for this article was finding a twin for a town mentioned by Darryl Francis (in the sense that one, El Canbaro, was a permutation of the letters of the other, Barcelona, W03-277). I thought it might be amusing to see how many twin places existed, as it seemed to be as good as basis for town twinning as the reasons often given for these excuses for mayoral junketing. I was overwhelmed: more than one third (about three-quarters of a million) of all places participate in twins, but also nearly a quarter of a million exist in triplets, and …

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

The Internal Combustion Typewriter, Dave Morice

Word Ways

When I started grade school in the 1950s, there was a sense of excitement in the air. Television had entered the homes of many Americans, and with it the desire to bring the world into the future. My third grade music teacher, Mr. Underwood, was a typist and an inventor. By day, he taught piano, and by night he typed up ideas for his inventions. One night, he realized that he could come up with many more ideas if he could type faster.

Ma Is A Nun, As I Am, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Provide a feast in honor of Pharaoh's home schooling, Rodney

Italian composer and wife behave immorally at a mountain pass

Would you like some saffron-seasoned rice in a meat sauce?

Diana's take on former Notre Dame coach: everyone's out to get him

Albert was bothered when his potato didn't arrive on time.

The Polyglot Ten-Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Hunting the Ten Square" in the May 2004 Word Ways, Rex Gooch mentions that Graham Toal recently succeeded in constructing by computer ten-squares based on 592,361 words drawn from various European languages. For the record, here are the two squares that he referred to.

Alphanumerically Truthful Equations

Word Ways

Susan Thorpe's pioneering excursion into alphanumeric arithmetic (WW '04-78) inspired me to look at the flip side of the coin and explore the alphanumerics of verbal equations. This involves adding up the numerical values of their letters using A=1 thru Z=26.* I began with the anagram ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE reported by Melvin O. Wellman in the April '48 issue of The Enigma, journal of the National Puzzlers League. This often regarded as the most perfect of all English anagrams. I reported several numero-logological coincidences regarding it in WW '02-308. I now report five more remarkable coincidences: …

Fabulous Creatures, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The collection has been compiled from over five hundred different sources, and contains a large number of weird and wonderful creatures, many not listed in standard references. For your enjoyment, here are some examples, one of each letter of the alphabet.

Counting With Your Fingers, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

Assuming that the thumb is your first finger, the index finger your second, and so on to the pinkie your fifth, here are the words in which each character typed on a qwerty typewriter keyboard by your nth finger appears precisely n times in the word.

The Campkin Poem, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

This poem, submitted by Henry Campkin to the March 8, 1873 British journal Notes and Queries, is somewhat nonsensical. It was written to please a group of youthful folk, and to show that the English tongue is as capable of being twisted into "uncouth shapes" as Latin. The terrible limp in the meter is unavoidable because one line of each couplet is largely palindromic.

Webster's Third Book Of Records, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The Guinness Book of Records has cataloged the world's extremes for nearly 50 years. First appearing in Britain in 1955 and the US in 1956, this book has listed the highest, the lowest, the hottest, the coldest, the longest, the smallest and so on, from a wide range of natural phenomena and human endeavors.

Denser Yet, And Yet Less Dense, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article concerns words of high and low density, ie a large sum with respect to the number of letters. A recent effort by Susan Thorpe (Lighter and Heavier, Word Ways, August 2003), also details previous work. She (deliberately, one supposes) omitted words, variously sanctioned by the OED and the Palindromicon, of length 5 or more, consisting solely of a repeated letter: I follow her in not using about 24 examples of repeated letters A, X, and Z.