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Presidential Name Games, Jim Puder
Presidential Name Games, Jim Puder
Word Ways
As familiar as we my think we are with the name of the U.S. presidents, a listing of their fully names might still provide some surprises. For example, how many of us can name, offhand, the three presidents whose first names are known to few these days? And who among us can rattle off, without consulting a reference, the middle names of Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Gerald R. Ford? In this article, we explore the roster of the full names of the U.S. presidents in search of amusement, amazement, and perhaps an occult revelation or two.
Dual Perms, Rex Gooch
Dual Perms, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
This article responds to the challenge set by Hugo Brandt Corstius in the May 2001 issue of Word Ways. He sought pairs of words that contained the same letters (i.e., permutations of each other), which were dual in the sense that a position occupied a vowel in one was occupied by consonant in the other. This article takes vowel to mean one of A, E, I, O, or U.
Number Trees And Networks, A. Ross Eckler, David Mroice
Number Trees And Networks, A. Ross Eckler, David Mroice
Word Ways
TWENTY-SEVEN has eleven letters, ELEVEN has six letters, SIX has three letters, THREE has five letters, and FIVE has four letters. No matter what number name one starts with, one always ends up at FOUR. Suppose instead one adds the number of letters in the name to the number itself to obtain a new number-name: TWENTY-SEVEN with eleven letters goes to THIRTY-EIGHT, and this sequence continues with FORTY-NINE, FIFTY-EIGHT,... ending with one of the last eight hundred number names in the thousand vigintillions.
The Suet Alphabet Revisited, Darryl Francis
The Suet Alphabet Revisited, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
In the August 1997 Word Ways, Nyr Indictor posted the Suet Alphabet problem. Namely, can each of the 26 letters be added in turn to SUET, and rearranged to provide a real word? Examples were given for 25 of the letters, but the rearrangement of SUET and Z was problematical.
Planet Packing Revisited, Dana Richards
Planet Packing Revisited, Dana Richards
Word Ways
Ross Eckler discusses a problem in his article "Planet Packing" in the May 2001 Word Ways: given a list of words, such as the names of the planets, how efficiently can they be packed into a single string of characters so that each word on the list can be read off left to right (but not necessarily contiguously)? He hypothesizes "there is no guarantee that any algorithm will end up with a minimum string." Since the design and analysis of algorithms has been my area of research for some 25 years, this caught my attention. Informally, an algorithm is a …
Two Dual Cryptograms, Candice Hirst
Two Dual Cryptograms, Candice Hirst
Word Ways
This was prompted by Doug McIlroy's "Dual Cryptograms" (Word Ways, August 1997). A dual cryptogram is two texts, each of which results from enciphering the other using a substitution cipher. This means that occurrences of the same letter in the first text are replaced by occurrences of the same letter in the second; different letters in the first are replaced by different letters in the second. No letter may stay as itself. Spaces are preserved; punctuation may be added or removed at will, and the distinction between lower and upper case is ignored. Although Doug treated hyphens like spaces, I …
Day And Color Packing, Darryl Francis
Day And Color Packing, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Ross Eckler explored planet packing in the May 2001 issue, attempting to generate an algorithm to create a string of letters from which the names of the planets could be read sequentially. Ross suggested readers might like to explore possible strings for other groups of names.
Kickshaws, Susan Thorpe
"Ironing The Bugs Out": Mixed Metaphors, Don Hauptman
"Ironing The Bugs Out": Mixed Metaphors, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
The mixed metaphor has long been vilified by language lovers. After all, a metaphor per se is often a stretch. The attempt to combine two or more vastly dissimilar figures of speech usually result in a jarring incongruity and an absurd image. Such clashes are often amusing, although the humor is strictly unintentional.
Word Squares? No, Oblongs!, Christopher Mcmanus
Word Squares? No, Oblongs!, Christopher Mcmanus
Word Ways
The Holy Grail of word grids is the elusive ten-square. Squares as a class are the overwhelming focus of word grid study. But squares are only a special case of the generalized word grid universe.
Bananagrams 14, Edmund Conti
Bananagrams 14, 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. Answers can be found in Answers and Solutions are the end of this issue.
Middle Names, William Webster
Middle Names, William Webster
Word Ways
For the purpose of this article, a middle name is a given name that can be centered in a dictionary word-the longer, the better. Two-letter names such as ED, AL, and JO can always be embedded (feEDer, deALer, banJOist), and I do not consider them further. Below is a type collection of nearly one hundred middle names of three or more letters; no doubt readers can add more. Six-letter names are hard to embed, and there is only one-seven-letter example. Often, one encounters agonizing near-misses like sCARLet, ePAULet and mAGNESia. I am indebted to the editor for adding a number …
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Three New Transdeletion Pyramids, Richard Sabey
Three New Transdeletion Pyramids, Richard Sabey
Word Ways
In "Two New Transdeletion Pyramids" in the May 1988 Word Ways, the editor gives two 17-letter transdeletion pyramids found by Kyle Corbin, the first of which consists of words from either Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language. I believe that a word found in Webster's Third is better than one found in Webster's Second but not the Third, because (whatever the faults of the Third or the merits of the Second), the Third superseded the Second.Accordingly, I pass on three 17-letter transdeletion pyramids consisting entirely of words in the Third or inflections implied by the Third, assuming that …
The Dictionary Of Wordplay, Richard Lederer
The Dictionary Of Wordplay, Richard Lederer
Word Ways
I wouldn't be a rich letterer if I didn't tell you that the acronimble Peter Pangram who put together this dictionary is an alphabet male, paronamazing pun gent, alliterary anagrammarian, morpheme addict, onomatopetic onomasticator, his Lexcellency who lives in a Camel lot of palindromedaries, Uncle Rebus, and Charader of the Lost Art.
Stubborn Rhymes, Ove Michaelsen
Stubborn Rhymes, Ove Michaelsen
Word Ways
It is said that there is no word in English that rhymes with MONTH, but GRUNTH, an alternate spelling of granth, rhymes perfectly is one of its pronunciations. Other rhymes for that word are millionth, billionth, trillionth and zillionth.
Designer Isomorphs, Susan Thorpe
Designer Isomorphs, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
It is twenty years since isomorphs were given significant room in Word Ways; "A Pattern Word Quiz" by Mary and Harry Hazard, appears in the November 1980 issue. In view of this time lapse, readers might find it useful to be reminded of the terminology associated with isomorphs.
A Bombastic Christmas: Discussion... Food!, Ara Shirinyan
A Bombastic Christmas: Discussion... Food!, Ara Shirinyan
Word Ways
With foods of all kind giving that brown-wood dining room pulpit a slap of color, our family got into a jovial mood, drinks in hands, stomachs with nothing to complain about, fully conscious of a scrupulous and scrumptious gala awaiting all of us. So first, a full classification of our food, stuffs that chart a sort of map that shows a trail to Christ's kingdom.
Ladders Summary, Rex Gooch
Ladders Summary, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
As the number of letters in a word decreases, the number of ladders increase sharply, despite there being only one-tenth the number of four-letter words as there are ten-letter words. The sharply increased number means that more and more restrictions may be applied but still ladders can be found. The following table summarizes this effect. Looking down a column, it can be seen that decreasing the word length by one multiplies the number of ladders of a given type by hundreds of times.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 2
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 2
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Planet Packing, A. Ross Eckler
Planet Packing, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Suppose that one has a list of words. What is the smallest string of letters needed to exhibit all of these words, each spelled out in order but not necessarily using adjacent letters in the string? For example, one, two, and three can be embedded in the eight-letter string thrwonee (or several others), but no seven-letter string is possible. It is easy to see that seven is the theoretical minimum, for six different letters appear once in any word, and one letter appears twice in a word. For longer lists, however, letter counts of individual words yield only a lower …
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
Charade Cubes, Christopher Mcmanus
Charade Cubes, Christopher Mcmanus
Word Ways
Charades are one of the oldest, simplest, and most amusing forms of wordplay. Charades are simply dissections of a word into two or more words, preferably unrelated to the original. Our greatest amusement derives from surprise at the buried images; for example, leg ally from legally, rap a city from rapacity, stag nation from stagnation, and either no table or not able from notable.
Stop Press! Newspaper Lanuage Lapses, Don Hauptman
Stop Press! Newspaper Lanuage Lapses, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
My friend and fellow recreational linguist Richard Lederer is surely the master of amusing language gaffes and bloopers, having immortalized the form in his popular Anguished English series of books. But I trust that Dr. Lederer will forgive me for attempting to game him at his own beat.
The Oz Contradictionary: Part 2
The Oz Contradictionary: Part 2
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. This is part of a continuing series of excerpts from his book.
Four-Letter Super Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch
Four-Letter Super Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Four-letter words are famously well connected to each other. Fewer than one per cent of words connect to no other, whereas over 70 per cent in each of the four possible positions-on average, there are 23 neighbours for each word. For our present purpose, note that more than three-quarters are heterograms. This means that Connoisseur's Ladders (those with sequential replacement between heterograms, plus a relationship between the first and last words) become commonplace. On the other hand, the number of such ladders is restricted by the relatively small number (fewer than 20,000) of four-letter words available.
Five-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch
Five-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
For five-letter words, over 60 per cent of words are heterograms, fewer than 2 per cent are isolanos, over a quarter onalosis, and each word has almost 13 neighbours on average--over two per letter. On the other hand, there are not many more than half the number of words to choose from compared to six-letter words. Also it is not possible to have sequential replacement between reversals: from ABCDE to EDCBA would proceed via EBCDE, EDCDE, then EDCDE again, and an implicit conditions of all our ladders is that no word should be repeated, so we will not find reversals …
Prime Time, Susan Thorpe
Prime Time, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
What is a PRIME WORD? There are at least three possible answers to this question.