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Articles 1741 - 1770 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
The Eleven-Square - Take One, Rex Gooch
The Eleven-Square - Take One, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
At the end of my article "Hunting the Ten-Square" (May 2004 Word Ways) I said that about one million 11-letter words might suffice to have a 50-50 chance of finding a square. I have since conducted some more investigations using both formula and programs, and conclude that more than two million words are needed to obtain a reasonable selection of squares.
English Loanwords In Japanese Tv Ads, Richard R.P. Gabbrielli
English Loanwords In Japanese Tv Ads, Richard R.P. Gabbrielli
Word Ways
Historically speaking, linguistic borrowing is a common phenomenon in the evolution of a language. However, unlike countries where English was adopted as an institutional variety as a result of linguistic legacy, the English found in Japan - specifically in television advertising - is a particularly intriguing linguistic puzzle. Although most of the English one sees on products and garments is often incomprehensible, pointless, or simply rude, advertisers/copy writers do have the power to manipulate the English language and 'engineer' changes to satisfy their own utilitarian purposes.
Can Math Limericks Survive?, Will Nediger
Can Math Limericks Survive?, Will Nediger
Word Ways
This famous mathematical limerick by Leigh Mercer appeared in the February 1980 Word Ways.
The Creatures Of English Idioms, Leonard R. N. Ashley
The Creatures Of English Idioms, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Word Ways
Animals and birds, even lower forms of life, appear significantly in the traditional and often colorful idioms of English which teach the wisdom of the folk. Are you wise enough to provide the correct expression - and, if necessary, the name of the creature involved in each of these cases.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Transposing One Genre Into Another, Susan Thorpe
Transposing One Genre Into Another, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
The letter pattern of some word genres is only a whisker away from the letter pattern of other word genres. My current objective is to change a word of one genre into a word of another genre by swapping the positions of just TWO of its letters. By this means, some tautonyms with the letter pattern 1212 (TOTO) make palindromes with the letter patterns 2112 and 1221 (OTTO and TOOT) simply by swapping the positions of the first 2 letters, or last 2 letters, respectively.
Numerical Palindromes: The Next Generation, Susan Thorpe
Numerical Palindromes: The Next Generation, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Several types of numerical palindromes have appeared in Word Ways (Susan Thorpe, Numerical Palindromes: Part 1 in Nov 1996 and Rex Gooch, Numerical Palindromes: Part 2 in Feb 1997). However, I believe the current exercise is the first to make two or more numerically-palindromic 'offspring' from the letters of a numerically-palindromic 'parent'. In other words, numerical palindromes beget numerical palindromes.
Shakespeare Anagrammed, Mike Keith
Shakespeare Anagrammed, Mike Keith
Word Ways
Shakespeare's Sonnet 117 can be anagrammed into the following poetic renditions of three famous plays.
Front Cover And Publication Information Volume 37 Issue 2
Front Cover And Publication Information Volume 37 Issue 2
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Vowel Patterns In The Oed, Susan Thorpe
Vowel Patterns In The Oed, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
In most words, the arrangement of the five major vowels A, E, I, O, and U, irrespective of the consonants, does not follow any particular pattern. In some words, however, vowels do exhibit specific patterns.
Hunting The Ten-Square, Rex Gooch
Hunting The Ten-Square, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
A ten-square consists of ten different 10-letter words written one under another, so that the first column reads the same as the first word, the second column the same as the second word, and so on.
A Recipe For Complete Dummies
Word Ways
But even a dummy is an inadequate lover if it only has limbs, neck and hair. So I've worked out a recipe for a complete dummy. Take the following ingredients, scale up or down to size, mix and voila! Many need to be scaled up or down to fit metrically. Forget rhyme. All are nouns, but some are forced. A few are abstract, but dummies have feelings.
State Name Overlaps, Darryl Francis
State Name Overlaps, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
In previous issues of Word Ways, attention has been drawn to US towns with names reflecting their position on the border between two states. Ed Wolpow's article "Names on the Border" in May 1984 provides a definitive list, including examples such as Florala (border of Florida Alabama) and Calneva (border of California and Nevada).
States And Capitals In Combination, Darryl Francis
States And Capitals In Combination, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
In the November 2001 Word Ways I examined the transposability of the name of the capitals of the 50 US states. In the February and May 2002 issues, I extended the study to the longest transdeletion and the shortest transaddition of each capital name. For instance, for MONTGOMERY, the longest transdeletion was MOTORMEN, a deletion of two letters, and the shortest transaddition was MYRINGOTOME, an addition of one letter. To extend this research, I now combine the names of the capitals and the corresponding states, seeking the longest transdeletion. For example, the longest transdeletion for AUSTIN TEXAS appears to be …
State Weights, Darryl Francis
State Weights, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Using the tried and tested process, let A=1, B=2, and so on, up to Z=26. Take each of the fifty US state names in turn and calculate the total value of the state name's constituent letters. These sums have been referred to as the weights of the corresponding words or names. The weights for the fifty state names, in increasing numerical order, are given in the first column in the table below. Now divide each of the weights by the number of letters in the corresponding state name. This gives an average weight per letter. Short these averages into increasing …
Buried States, Darryl Francis
Buried States, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Recently, I noted that the state name Oregon is buried in the word 'foregone'; could I find other examples? I decided to concentrate on state names with six letters or fewer (Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah), ignoring words that were obviously derived from the state names concerned (such as Hawaiitic, meaning Hawaiian-like, and Oregonite, a mineral found in Oregon). Eventually I found examples from all but Hawaii.
Tautonyms And Tens, Arthur F. Holt
Tautonyms And Tens, Arthur F. Holt
Word Ways
In 1921 Tunste {pseudonym of Paul Bryan, a National Puzzlers' League member} revealed to Puzzledom the famous formula for constructing a 10-square out of five different reduplication words - a clever idea, the practicality of which has since been fully demonstrated.
State Letter Banks: The Long And Short Of It, Darryl Francis
State Letter Banks: The Long And Short Of It, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Take each of the 50 US state names in turn. For each state name, reduce the name to the list of different letters occurring in the state name, ignoring repeated occurrences of letters (for example, Alabama to ABLM). For each such sequence, what is the longest and the shortest word that can be made from all the different letters, allowing repeated use of any letter? (In the National Puzzlers' League, collections of such words, not merely the longest and shortest possible, are known as a Letter Bank.)
Planet Packing In Two Dimensions, A. Ross Eckler
Planet Packing In Two Dimensions, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
"Planet Packing" in the May 2001 Word Ways demonstrated that it is possible to use the 26-letter string MNVESARCPJLUPITHOURYANUSER to spell out each of the nine planet names in order. (Many other 26-letter strings are possible, but no 25-letter one has been found.) This article shows how to pack the planets in two dimensions. The loosest pack is, of course, the standard crossword. In the November 1998 Kickshaws, Jim Puder packed the planets (plus SUN, MOON , and UNIVERSE) into a 9x12 rectangle. The planets alone can be contained in a 10x10 square, given below at the left, but one …
State And Presidential Square Sets, Jim Puder
State And Presidential Square Sets, Jim Puder
Word Ways
With the 2004 election looming, perhaps it is time to take belated noticed of the fact that we presently live in a rare presidential square-set era. By a "square set," I mean a set of things, the letters of whose names add up to some square number. Such sets are chiefly interesting for the fact that they evenly fill square grids; when they do so in such a way that all of their words remain intact and unbent, they are said to "pack" their grids. There are two broad categories of square sets, number-name square sets and non-numerical square sets. …
"The Whole Kettle Of Fish In A Nutshell": Mixed Metaphors Redux, Don Hauptman
"The Whole Kettle Of Fish In A Nutshell": Mixed Metaphors Redux, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
In our previous episode on the subject, "Ironing the Bugs Out: Mixed Metaphors" (Word Ways, August 2001), I recounted egregious and amusing real-life illustrations of this popular solecism.
The Movie Star Behind The Presidents, Dave Morice, Monte J. Zerger
The Movie Star Behind The Presidents, Dave Morice, Monte J. Zerger
Word Ways
Harrison Ford is a movie star of the first magnitude. Whether he knows it or not, he's also a wordplay star. His name, his movies, and his life connect him, in one or more ways, to all the American presidents but one. Perhaps more than any other person in the history of the Republic, he is presidential, so much so that several websites promoted him for president in 2000.
Straight Down The Middle, Susan Thorpe
Straight Down The Middle, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
So sang Bing Crosby. In the current context, however, it describes the chopping of a word into two halves, each half with the same number of letters. Hence only words with an even number of letters can be considered. The letters of the first half and second half, respectively, of a parent word are rearranged to make two new words, the offspring.
Cheater's Selfish-Synonymy
Word Ways
The February issue (WW 04-45) gave the results of my systematic search for coincidental self-synonymy: pairs of words that are unrelated etymologically but via convergent evolution happen to be spelled the same and c. mean the same. I extended the coverage to near-synonymic pairs as well and to unrelated contronymic (self-opposite) pairs.
Can All Words Be Expressed As Sumagrams?, Daniel Austin
Can All Words Be Expressed As Sumagrams?, Daniel Austin
Word Ways
At the place where mathematics and the world of anagrams overlap, many interesting phenomena arise, as regular readers of Word Ways are frequently reminded. Undoubtedly the most famous example is the anagram ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE discovered by Melvin Wellman over half a century ago, with equality both mathematically and as an anagram. Two more of these appeared in Word Ways in 1992. They are Spanish examples by Lee Sallows: CATORCE + UNO = ONCE + CUATRO and DOCE + TRES = TRECE + DOS.
Neologisms For The New Millennium, Ove Michaelsen
Neologisms For The New Millennium, Ove Michaelsen
Word Ways
My friend Lois Fischer refers to a one-sided conversation as a unisation. Another friend once suggested that affluential describes influence obtained by affluence. The filling of a book by negative reviews or poor promotion could be referred to as bibliocide. Comedic suicide could be called self-induced comicide. The act of home-wrecking could be a case of domicide.
Us Presidents: Transadditions, Rex Gooch
Us Presidents: Transadditions, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Darryl Francis (W2004-25) requests transadditions of the names of eight US Presidents. There are many to choose from in each case, apart from McKinley; but this is counter-balanced by the statement of Harrison's policies, and some connections to other Presidents.
Reg, Or Roger?, John E. Connett
Reg, Or Roger?, John E. Connett
Word Ways
Reg and Roger are twins, not identical, but two sides of the same coin.