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Articles 2011 - 2040 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
The Model A Palindrome Machine, Bill A. O'Connor
The Model A Palindrome Machine, Bill A. O'Connor
Word Ways
This machine, the Model A palindrome (PD) generator, will permit you to make PDs as easily as spinning a pirouette on a kitchen stool and falling flat on your nose in the kitty litter, right in front of the Bishop. True, it will not allow you to create PDs without taking a little thought, but draw comfort in your great affliction form the fact that a completely automatic PD generator is currently in the works; keep watching the most cutting-edge of logojournals, Word Ways.
Puzzles And Games On Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell
Puzzles And Games On Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell
Word Ways
In their article "Numerical Patterns and Geometrical Configurations" on pages 82-92 of Mathematics Magazine 57 (1984), Harold Dorwart and Warren Page note that the venerable David Hilbert once remarked "...there was a time when the study of configurations was considered the most important branch of all geometry." "Today," added Dorwart and Page, "...most students have limited knowledge about configurations-except perhaps the Pappus (9,3), the Desargue (10,3), and the Petersen graph (the logo on the cover of the Journal of Graph Theory)."
Number Names In Words And Phrases, Rex Gooch
Number Names In Words And Phrases, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Ross Eckler's Making the ALphabet Dance (St. Martin's 1996) lists 20 words on page 236, each containing one of the number names from 1 to 20, using the Pocket Merriam-Webster as source. As an example, COUNTERFEIT contains FOURTEEN. The following page similarly list 26 of the number names for 30 to 99 included in words from Webster's Second, many found by Jeremy Morse.
Transposing The State Capitals, Darryl Francis
Transposing The State Capitals, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
The subject of finding transposals for the US state names has been documented many times in Word Ways. However, I don't believe that any attention has been paid to seeking transposals for the names of the state capitals. I decided to have a shot at seeing how many of the 50 state capital names could be transposed. Initially, my hopes were not particularly high-I expected to find no more than a handful of transposable names, perhaps 5 or 6. In the event, I unearthed 20 transposals, some of them perfectly good dictionary words, and others requiring a little more flexibility …
Full Many A Sonnet End-Word Have I Seen, Mike Keith
Full Many A Sonnet End-Word Have I Seen, Mike Keith
Word Ways
The poem below is constructed from the 308 first and last words from the 154 Shakespearean sonnets. Although done in a free-verse style, it is based on the 'ballad supreme' form, with three stanzas, each ending with the same refrain, followed by an 'envoy'.
Modern Nine-Squares, Chris Cole
Modern Nine-Squares, Chris Cole
Word Ways
Thousands of nine-squares are known to logology, so one of the remaining challenges is to build them from restricted sources. This article discusses building a nine-square using only words and phrases that are in current use. Consider, for example, the following nine-square.
Acrostic Variations, Susan Thorpe
Acrostic Variations, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Much has been written on the history of the acrostic as a form of wordplay, both in Word Ways and elsewhere, and I do not intend to dwell upon the aspect of the genre. Suffice to say that the acrostic seems to have first appeared in the 1850s, had its Victorian heyday, and then disappeared from mainstream wordplay as it gave way to the crossword puzzle in 1913.
Patterns In Dutch For Ten-Letter Words, Hugo Brandt Corstius
Patterns In Dutch For Ten-Letter Words, Hugo Brandt Corstius
Word Ways
In "Near-Alternating Vowels and Consonants" in the August 2000 issue of Word Ways, A. Ross Eckler exhibited English words for all but three of the 178 distinct ways one can assign consonants and vowels to ten-letter words so that there are no more than two consonants or two vowels in succession. In the following, I demonstrate that one can find Dutch examples for all 178 patterns. For the VVCCVVCCVV pattern I could find only one Dutch word.
Britannia Rules The Waves; Others Waive The Rules, Don Hauptman
Britannia Rules The Waves; Others Waive The Rules, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
The New York Press is a free weekly "alternative" newspaper that is livelier and less doctrinaire than The Village Voice, its archival.
Thoughts On Being Plagiarized (Sort Of), Richard Kostelanetz
Thoughts On Being Plagiarized (Sort Of), Richard Kostelanetz
Word Ways
I've always regarded my work as so extreme and idiosyncratic that, if only to define its integrity, it resisted plagiarism. In fact, little has proved my assumption wrong. Some 35 years ago, a Columbia professor doing an anthology of short fiction presented ideas that looked suspiciously familiar, even though mine hadn't yet been published. I thought the prof might have gotten them from a manuscript submitted to a magazine of which he was a junior editor. Since the prof was more than ten years my senior, while I was 25, I had a problem confronting him. I recall writing a …
Darehitsfibertyros!, William Webster
Darehitsfibertyros!, William Webster
Word Ways
No, this title is not a German curse - rather, it is an instruction to Read This Brief Story. How so? Divide the title into the four words Dare Hits Fiber Tyros, and anagram the letters of each word into another word. Now try the same strategy on the following 225-letter story of a Scrabble tournament.
Sets Of Words With Alphabetic Progression, Rex Gooch
Sets Of Words With Alphabetic Progression, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
This article responds to the challenge posed by Susan Thorpe on page 212 of the August 2001 issue of Word Ways. We seek a word that still produces valid words when the first letter is replaced by A, and when the second letter is replaced by B, etc. However, much of this article is taken up with two generalizations. The first is to examine other word lengths. In the second, we depart from the concept of invariance, in which the position of a letter in the word is the same as its position in the alphabet, and merely require that …
Anything Trilinear, Darryl Francis
Anything Trilinear, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Why anything trilinear? Those two words in the title are non-crashing isomorphs of the two-word term "Designer Isomorphs," the title of Susan Thorpe's article in the May 2001 issue. (A quick reminder: isomorphs are words having the same letter pattern. Susan's example was EXCESS BAMBOO, with both words sharing the pattern 123144, ANYTHING and DESIGNER share the pattern 12345627, while TRILINEAR and ISOMORPHS share the pattern 123435672. Two isomorphs are said to crash if they share the same letter(s) in the same position(s). ANYTHING and DESIGNER don't crash, and neither do TRILINEAR and ISOMORPHS, so they are noncrashing isomorphs).
Kickshaws, David Morice
Uoiea Words, Susan Thorpe
Uoiea Words, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
This is a companion to AEIOU in Order (Word Ways 98037 with additions in 98115 and 99262). It lists words in which the five vowels each occur once, in reverse alphabetical order. A few of these words have appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Language on Vacation and/or in Word Ways, but the majority of them will be new to readers.
Loldigocks And The Bhree Tears, William Brandt Jr.
Loldigocks And The Bhree Tears, William Brandt Jr.
Word Ways
Once upon a time there was a gittle lid with such pretty cellow yurls that people called her Loldigocks. Loldigocks lived with her mother in a cittle lottage near a fig borest. Whenever Loldigocks asked if she could go for a walk in the fig borest, her mother would always say "Nertainly sot! The fig borest is doo tangerous! It is full of bicked wears that like to eat gittle lirls!"
Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim
Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim
Word Ways
This mysterious document, entitled Text B, was found among the literary remains of a famous author. It should not be confused with Minoan B, which represents an entirely different rubric.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Complementary Letters
Word Ways
The hidden DNA message in "The Oz Contradictioanry: Part 2" in the May issue, EVOLVE BY LOVE, was decoded by modeling an alphabet: anti-alphabet array after the anti-parallel structure of the double helix to dictate 26 base pairs, i.e., the complementary letter bigrams az by ex dw ev fu gt hs ir jq kp lo mn nm ol pk qj ri sh tg uf ve wd xc yb ca. Tandemly combining some of these yielded the above message, plus three other phrases nicely relevant to the adjoining polyanagram poem "Biodiversity". Can you find these? They involve two new words plus …
Numerically Equivalent Letter Replacements, Susan Thorpe
Numerically Equivalent Letter Replacements, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Readers will be familiar with assigning A=1, B=2 though Z=26 to find the letter total of a word. Most of the words in this article can be found in the OED Second Edition. dfpf = A Dictionary of the Flowering Plants & Ferns, CUP 1966. Clafouti (cherry flan) can be found in recipe books.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 3
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 3
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
The Two-Year Grid, Eric Angelini
The Two-Year Grid, Eric Angelini
Word Ways
In the rectangular grid below, the 21 number names from 0 through 20 each appear once, along with the eight additional number-names 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100. Both the horizontal number names and the vertical ones add to 365, the number of days in a year. Furthermore, all number-names are connected, forming a single network. Can anyone construct a grid smaller than 16x17 in which all this is possible?
Twenty Thousand Palindromic "And" S, Bill A. O'Connor
Twenty Thousand Palindromic "And" S, Bill A. O'Connor
Word Ways
On page 96 of I Love Me, Vol. I, Michael Donner suggests that the ordinary possibilities of the English palindrome are so close to being exhausted that, if new work is to be produced, it may become necessary to enlist the aid of obscure abbreviations in the collection by Ralph de Sola. Word Ways editor A. Ross Eckler perhaps also has in mind the 'drome may be used up when he remarks on page 291 of the November issue that palindromes are not very important to Word Ways because they follow well-trodden paths.
Onomatopoeia And Language Perception, Joshua Nash
Onomatopoeia And Language Perception, Joshua Nash
Word Ways
"Voon-voon" says the dog in Laos whilst in Romania the same creature says "ham-ham". The question we may ask here is whether dogs in different locals are saying different things or whether we humans perceive what they are saying differently? It seems common sense that a labrador in Asia and Europe will make the same noise completely independent of its surroundings. Why then does an English speaker, who is thinking "woof-woof", laugh on finding out that in Indonesia, humans perceive dogs as making the sound "gong-gong"?
Two Sonnet Anagram Puzzles, Michael Keith
Two Sonnet Anagram Puzzles, Michael Keith
Word Ways
The poem below is stanza XXVI from the poem "Picthorn Manor" by American poet and critic Amy Lowell (1874-1925). Below it is a sonnet (in the usual form, with fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme) made from the letters in Ms. Lowell's poem. Aside form being an anagram, the sonnet has another unusual feature. Can you spot it?
Three Anagrams Of Psalms 119, Richard Brodie
Three Anagrams Of Psalms 119, Richard Brodie
Word Ways
The 119th Psalm in notable for a variety of reasons.
The Oz Contradictionary: Part 3
The Oz Contradictionary: Part 3
Word Ways
"Anil" is the pen name of Dr. Charles Melton, a retired Oz (Australian) biologist who privately published in 1999 a 98-page booklet, up/dn, a dictionary and contradictionary of wordplay including anagrams, palindromes and charades. See February 2001 Word Ways for introduction.