Digital Commons Network^™

A Nine-Square With A Non-Palindrome Diagonal, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As explained in my article Nine-Square with Palindromic Diagonal (Word Ways May 2002), the SW-NE diagonal must be palindromic. Such squares are rare (say, as common as ten-squares). Distinctly rarer is a nine-square such as follows, which has a frequency I estimate to be around 1 in 300,000 nine-squares.

Two New Pangrammic Challenges, Mark Isaak

Word Ways

The alphabet has 26 letters, but writing uses more than 26 symbols. If I want to display all the elements of a typeface, for example, "the quick brown fox..." does not suffice. My first challenge is to create a pangram which, following accepted conventions of capitalization, displays all 26 letters in both upper and lower case.

One + Twelve = Two + Eleven

Word Ways

1. Eleven + two = twelve + one is an amazing and rightly famous anagram. I wish to add to its mystique by revealing some more deep coincidences, based on rearranging the terms to

2. two + eleven = one + twelve, or, as I prefer.

3. one + twelve = two + eleven (a word reversal of equation #1).

These two are also anagrams and palindromes in numerical form (shown for #3): 1+12=2+11. (The palindrome requires altered punctuation, as is conventional in verbal palindromes.) More surprisingly, they're both anagrams and palindromes in Roman numerals as well: I+XII=II+XI.

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Shiftgrams Revisited, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The concept of word-shifts was introduced in Dmitri Borgmann's Language on Vacation (1965). Consider the word COLD for instance. Shifting each of the letters three spaces forward in the alphabet, COLD becomes FROG: and shifting the letters of CHEER seven spaces forward produces JOLLY. Dmitri offered many other examples in his book.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Word Neighbours And Onalosis, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article is a partial update of my "Statistics of Word Neighbours" in the November 1997 Word Ways, and provides the facts laying behind the findings in the recent series (August 2000 through May 2001) of articles on word ladders. Two words are neighbours if they differ in a single letter. In this article, each such word is credited as having a neighbour, i.e. the link between them in counted twice (please refer to the earlier article for prior work and more information). The following table updates various parts of the article.

Special Word-Unit Windows In Running Text, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The idea of searching existing for accidental windows (contiguous blocks of text) having special properties has been explored often in Word Ways, but previous studies have usually considered letter-unit constraints such as the lipogram or pangram. In this article, inspired by similar explorations in the new edition of Opperlands! Taal- & letterkunde (Battus' seminal book on Dutch wordplay), we focus on textual windows having special word-unit properties.

On Location With Aeiou, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

AEIOU Words, those which contain just one each of the 5 major vowels, have always held a fascination for logologists, especially those words in which the 5 vowels appear in alphabetical order (AEIOU), and reverse alphabetical order (UOIEA), respectively. FACETIOUS and SUBCONTINENTAL are examples. Below, I offer a substantial addition to the collections of these words which have already appeared in Word Ways. Most of them are the names of locations taken from The United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN). These are populated places unless stated otherwise. Let us begin by taking a brief look at the current state …

Mixed-Up Classics, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In his article "No Gnus is Good Gnus" in the February 2002 Word Ways, Jim Puder showed what might have happened to some famous palindromes if their authors had been "suffering from the gnus", for example, A man, a pung, a gnu - Panama.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

My First Ten-Square, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A ten-square should consist of ten different 10-letter words, all to be found in reputable dictionaries or perhaps gazetteers, arranged one under another so that the first row word is the same as the first column word, and so on, ie something like.

Moose Laurels: New Spoonerisms, Part 1, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Since childhood, I have indulged a perverse fascination with spoonerisms, chaismus, and other forms of linguistic reversal. This passion culminated in the publication of my quasi-definitive book on transpositional humor, Cruel and Unusual Puns (Dell, 1991).

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

On The Abundance Of Palindromes, Jim Puder

Word Ways

A very long time ago there lived a tribe of primitive cave-people who had learned how to write but who could not yet speak in complete sentences. When, therefore, Thog the Thinker one day ascended the Speaker's Stone and casually let drop the first complete sentence that anyone had ever heard, the sensation was terrific. Thog's achievement was all the more astounding inasmuch as the tribe's wisest heads had long opined, in disconnected grunts, that the formulation of a complete sentence was a feat considerably beyond the compass of human ingenuity. In a state of high excitement, Skog the Scrivener …

Silvery Sleep, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

August 2002 is the 25th, or silver, anniversary of the death of rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presely. Elvis died in August 1977, and has been the subject of two previous articles of mine in Word Ways, "Elvis Lives" in February 1993, and "Elvis for Everyone" in May 1993. Prompted by recent trips to Tupelo, Mississippi (his birthplace) and Memphis, Tennessee, I decided to take a new look at the wordplay that could be spun around some of the words, names and song titles in Elvis' life and career. My findings are presented here twenty-five years after Elvis' death.

Meaningful Word Ladders

Word Ways

Word ladders are strings of equal-length words that change one letter at each step. They have featured often in Word Ways since the first issue (Borgmann '68-27: Eckler's '69-70, Corbin '88-103, Gordon '90-22, 154, and especially Gooch '98-89 + '00-209, 212, 284). These references are the source of many of the word pairs and a few of the strings used here. But while their ladders often connected related words, the connecting words are generally irrelevant to the terminal pair. Here and in three accompanying articles I present cases in which the whole ladder makes some sort of coherent sense, a …

Powerful Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

There are two types of what I call powerful words:

whole words whose letter totals (assigning a=1, b=2, ... z=26) are a square, a cube etc.

words which break into a series of letter groups each of whose total is a square, cube etc.

Let us begin by taking a look at the first of these types of powerful word. Unreferenced words are in the OED, Second Edition. Sources of non-OED words are given at the end.

Of Visa For The Mind, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

We've all heard the story, possibly apocryphal, about the computer program for language translation which renders "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into Russian and then back to English as "The whiskey is fine but the meat has gone bad." I wondered just how likely it was that such a humorous result would occur and, more importantly, just how useful is such a program for meaningful translation? Using the Lernout & Hauspie Simply Translating program which translates English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish and from those languages back to English, I picked six common aphorisms …

Forwards And Backwards Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article is mainly concerned with what I will call Forwards and Backwards words, in which the letter progress forwards through the alphabet to the middle of the word, then backwards. The reverse, Backwards and Forwards words, are also dealt with. However, to begin, I recapitulate the simpler cases of words in which each successive letter occupies a later position in the alphabet (which, clearly, I must call Forwards words), and those in which each successive letter occupies an earlier position in the alphabet (Backwards words).

Bananagrams 18, 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 the anagram.

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 6

Word Ways

This collection of anagram poetry is excerpted from a privately published book, "up/dn, a dictionary and contradictionary of anagrams..." (see February 2001 Word Ways for details). The book, revised, will be available as a Word Ways monograph in the near future.

Maoris: A Word Puzzle, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

A new kind of magic square has recently been discovered and our puzzle MAORIS is a realization in words of the 4x4 case. In addition, MAORIS can be played effectively as a two-person board game that has a rather subtle forced win for one of the combatants.

Mallarme, Word-Painter Of Comets, Paul Maxim

Word Ways

Question: What is more fascinating than a giant comet?

Answer: the image of such a comet, when extracted from a matrix puzzle wherein it was not known to exist.

Half-Half Transposals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Most readers will be familiar with split-word transposals such as HORSEHOER in which the letters of the first half of the words are repeated in the second half in a different order. The current exercise is similar, but different in that it concerns pairs of words rather than a single word. I set out to find pairs of words (such as ISOL.ATED and SOLIDATE) in which the letters of the first half of the first word, rearranged, form the letters of the first half of the second word; and the letters of the second half of the first word, rearranged, …

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Crossing The Seasons

Word Ways

This word ladder mandala takes advantage of two neat coincidences: that all four seasons have six-letter names, as noted by Lewis Carroll, and that each has exactly two letters in common with "season" -- and with each other, except Sp-W with three.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Azorean: New Spelling For The 21st Century, Joli Quentin Kansil

Word Ways

The world has rockets, computer, radios, skyscrapers, and miracle medicines, but it is still plagued with the same archaic spelling from centuries ago. Isn't it time that the spelling of words in English caught up with the advances of modern times? There is no rational reason for spelling 'though' with six letter when two can do the job admirably. The main thrust behind reform spelling systems has been to have one symbol for one sound so that there are no inconsistencies and no silent letters. With reformed spelling all words are spelled exactly as they are sounded, students learn to …

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.