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Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Raven Two, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The poem below, including the above title, is an exact anagram of the 4905 characters in Poe's poem "The Raven, the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe", also including its title.

Begin Now, Nick Montfort

Word Ways

In the following love poem all the words are in alphabetical order. I am indebted to the much more extensive, if much less sensible and cyntactical, Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love by Eve Rhymer. Her work contains all the words from a romance novel, alphabetized into 25 chapters (no X). A more sensible and very impressive work of this sort is the last chapter of Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa, a list of alphabetized two-word phrases that recapitulate the novel.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Sign Here, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

I've had more than 500 poems published. Of course, they've been mostly in obscure publications, and by the time I ticked them all off to you they would have disappeared from view. I write a weekly column for our local newspaper, but based on the feedback (none), I wonder if anyone is reading it. Occasionally I get an honorable mention or even a first prize in the New York Magazine Competition and someone might tell me, "Hey I saw your limerick in The New Yorker." O.K., it's not a limerick (not usually) and, it's not the The New Yorker.

Hard-Working Words, Chris Cole

Word Ways

There are about two million words in the English language and exactly twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Therefore, the average English word should be less than five letters long, since there are over eleven million words that can be spelled with five letters. However, in fact the average length of an English word is around twelve letters.

Rat Slink Trestle, William Webster

Word Ways

Het weest ism tasted, "Thaw era orad appels?"

Shore surname," eth ahorse rhamnose periled.

Rented earthed Riding Horse created whit hocks. Ti saw whit retag ferlie, hes cloud being het frits mage.

Bananagrams 11, 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 at the end of the issue.

The Name Is The Game, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Al Gore's name spoonerized is "galore" which turns out to be a clever Al Gore rhythm. This year Republicans are experiencing Al Gore-aphobia, but are hoping to Bush whack the opposition. George Bush's name anagrammed becomes "He bugs Gore," and, adding the the W, "He grew bogus" which I realize you may interpret as a Bush League prey on words. Switching first letters of the candidates' last names, we discover that one will gush and the other will bore. Looks like we're in for a Gore-Tex campaign--I hope it doesn't leak. I predict that at the end of the campaign …

Generalized Alternades: Part 1, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article reports on work done on alternades and their generalisations. It presents new longer alternades, trinades, etc., and reports for the first time (as far as I can see) words which have these properties up to three ways-polyalternades or multiple alternades. I have also found words whose extracted words are themselves alternades (multilevel alternades).

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Footwords To Howl, For Solomon, Onon Gonsborg

Word Ways

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Bananagrams 10, 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 at the end of the issue.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 33 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Aeiouy Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

With the 30-year quest for AEIOU words now behind us, I have taken the opportunity to add the letter Y and repeat the exercise for AEIOUY words. Y acts as a vowel in words such as symbol and is referred to variously as the sixth vowel, a semi-vowel or a secondary vowel. The world of AEIOUY words, those in which the six vowels A, E, I, O, U, and Y each occur just once, takes us into largely unexplored territory. There are 720 permutations of the six vowels A, E, I , O , U, and Y, six times as …

Wacky Ways With Words, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the May 2000 Word Ways, Lionel Simard's story about Alma Anderson, an avid American amateur acrobat, uses only words starting with the letter A. Can other letters support extended narratives that make reasonable sense? Surprisingly, the letter W can be used, as illustrated by the following story of Winnie and her brother Walter's misadventures in the Wisbeach Woods. The original can be found in Don Lemon's century-old Everybody's Scrapbook of Curious Facts.

Anagramming The Bible, Michael Keith

Word Ways

A book containing apposite letter-unit anagrams of every verse in three complete books of the King James Bible ("The Anagrammed Bible: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon" by Richard Brodie and Mike Keith) was recently published [1]. In this article I present some logological observations and discoveries resulting form the completion of this project.

The Elucidators, Jeremiah Farrell, Frank Harary, Christopher C. Mihelich

Word Ways

In his posthumous work, the mammoth Cyclopedia of Puzzles published in 1914 by his son, the noted American puzzlist Sam Loyd (184101911) includes the problem "Duck Shooting at Buzzard's Bay." This interesting puzzle is reprinted as problem #96in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd (Dover, 1959).

Near-Ideal Nine-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In my article "Snakes and Ladders" in the May 1998 Word Ways, I recorded just one example of a word ladder with nine-letter words. The impression may have been given that it was the only one. As recorded in "Statistics of Word Neighbors". In the November 1997 issue, about 48 per cent of nine-letter words have one or more words that will sit next to them in a ladder, so, given in excess of 100,000 nine-letter words, there will be many ladders.

Mizmaze: The Labyrinth Of Lanugage, Dave Morice

Word Ways

This poem, dedicated to Ross Eckler, uses words that contain all 676 bigrams from AA to ZZ, one per word. The words with bigrams occur in alphabetic order as they are listed on pp. 65-68 of Making the Alphabet Dance. Another 676 words connect them. Each of the 26 stanzas contains the 26 bigram words beginning with the same letter. For instance, the first stanza has all the A-bigram words, from bazAAr to magAZine. The entire poem is both grammatically and bigrammatically correct.

What Are The Odds X Is An Anagram Of Y?, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In a recent Word Ways article, "Celebrity One-Word Anagrams", the problem of finding famous (or even not-so-famous) people whose first and last names can be anagrammed into a single word was discussed. This raises questions of the form: how many people with N-letter combined names might we expect to encounter, in order to find one whose name is a single-word anagram? In this article I present some answers to this and other similar questions.

Another Mary Sonnet, Michael Keith

Word Ways

Dave Morice's sonnetized Mary in the May 2000 Kickshaws inspired me to transpose the letters of Shakespearean Sonnet 143 into an approximation to "Mary Had a Little Lamb". As can be seen, the subject of Sonnet 143 also involves domestic animals!

Near-Alternating Vowels And Consonants, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

There exist 1024 (2^10) different patterns of vowels and consonants in ten-letter words. Among these 178 have no more than two consonants of two vowels in a row. These are the ones for which it is most likely that examples can be found. The following collection of words form Webster's Second Edition lists 175; can readers fill in the three missing patterns, or find more common words for the others?

Ten-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In my article "Near-Ideal Nine Letter Word Ladders" in the August 2000 Word Ways I stated six criteria for a Connoisseur's Ladders: the technical criteria of changing all words in the minimum number of steps (in sequence), and the aesthetic ones of familiar words with apposite meanings. I found about 50 ladders which meet some of the technical criteria, and perhaps none which met the aesthetic ones, though BRAWNIEST-TWINKLERS might be regarded as amusing.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Labeling A List With Unique Identifiers, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Suppose that one wishes to replace words in a list by abbreviations in order to save space. If one allows abbreviations of variable length, a very simple rule is: use as many letters as needed to ensure that a word is not confused with any other word. For example, the states Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware... can be replaced by ALAB, ALAS, ARI , ARK, CA, COL, CON, D...

Indian Givers: Amerindian State Names, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Americans have wiped off the map many of the aboriginal names, but the names of geographical features that cannot be owned by individuals, such as those of mountains and great rivers, have often been left with their Amerindian names (sometimes mangled by later arrivals). Here are the Amerindian origins of some US states. Can you name the states? (Indiana is not included, nor is the land of the Utes).

A Transaddition Ancestry, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

In the November 1992 and May 1993 Kickshaws, Peter Newby wrote of a transaddition ancestry where each woman gave her daughter a name which was a transdeletion of her own, "I" being the end of the line. At least so he says, but, if they named their daughters that way, Brenda Eva Nellie's mother was not Brenda Elvira Rene!

Katie And Jay, An Odious Essay, Nick Montfort

Word Ways

This alphonetic tale of Katie and Jay described fornication and violent death. Children should read instead William Steig's excellent illustrated works C D B and C D C?