Digital Commons Network^™

Yes, We Have No Ascenders (Part 2), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the first part of this article (May 1999), we presented words consisting solely of ascenders (bdfhiklt], descenders (gjpqy), body letters (acemnorsuvwxz), or ascenders or decenders. In this part, we consider words consisting of cyclic mixtures of the various types. For example, Darryl Francis gave SINCIZING and LUTEINIZING as alternating body

Typewriter Words, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article we probe the subject of wordplay based on the typewriter keyboard. Dmitri Borgmann devoted two pages to this topic in Language on Vacation; we start by re-examining his findings and then consider some new topics.

Unlimited-Bag Scrabble, Stephen Root

Word Ways

In the November 1984 Word Ways, Alan Frank presented a 7096-point Scrabble game using an unlimited bag of titles. His dictionary of record was Webster's Second, allowing unsanctioned words like BENZDIOXDIAZINE. Here is a 6250-point solution based on Scrabble-sanctioned words from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and the 10th edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Drawn Inward And Other Poems: Part 1, Mike Maguire

Word Ways

In Umbrage

At one mention,

lying ravens

peck soft hearts.

See kind images

in a memento.

Go dig at her scar.

Let no test end.

Anger

slays her, elapses.

Words Of A Feather, William Young

Word Ways

Have you ever encountered a white-whiskered hermit or a festive coquette? How about a rifleman or a firewood-gatherer? Have you seen a village weaver or a bearded mountaineer? What about a red-tailed comet or a shining sunbeam? If you answered in the affirmative to any of these questions, you are probably a birdwatcher, because these are all names of birds from around the world. The common names of birds reflect a use of language almost as colorful as their plumages.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Split Sentence Transposals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Most of us are familiar with words like HORSESHOER in which the letters making the first half of the word are transposed to make the second half of the word. The following examples can all be found in previous issues of Word Ways, and most recently appeared amongst Rex Gooch's list of pair isograms in the February 1998 issue.

Changing Male Name Fashions 1870-1950, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

This article is based on a talk given to the 23rd Annual Names Institute of the American Names Society on May 5, 1984.

Bananagrams 7, 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 anagrams. Answers will be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Het Fryer Dire, William Webster

Word Ways

Lydia, Ardeb bedmaker no eth Panicle Landis Refry. Het seizable hips saw admen Capelin Leis, refrying myna derris whi ither arcs, struck, fiche, Merits Riant.

Card-Shuffle Anagrams, Michael Keith

Word Ways

Diane sat quietly, watching the evening sunlight speckle through the trees. It would be pretty, she thought, if only it didn't show the dirt on the kitchen window so vividly. "What a mess this place is," she said, half out loud. He would be back soon, and then she would have to ask about the gun in the bedroom drawer. That it was Lent, and she was hungry, only added to her ever-growing list of disgruntlement.

Deb Abed, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The life and loves of Deb, a lady of pleasure who died during the London blitz in the Second World War.

The Persian Version, Leonard Ashley

Word Ways

Now they call it Iran, but we still have Persian cats. Persian lamb, and Persian rugs. We also have a considerable number of words in English derived (usually through French or some other language) from Persian. Can you identify the following

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Cracking The Pi-Code, Dave Morice

Word Ways

To the mathematician, pi is "the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter." To the typographer, pi is "jumbled up type." To the cryptologist, however, pi can be considered a string of digits written in code. A pi-code is simple--ten letters replacing ten numbers. If pi were itself decided, what words would appear?

The Postal Union, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In his first column as Kickshaws editor in February 1989, Dave Morice showed how one could construct chains of state names using their postal codes: for example, MaINe contains the bigram IN which stand for Indiana, INDiana contains the bigram ND which stands for North Dakota. Recently, I realized that this is an example of a directed graph which I discussed in another context in " Directed Word Chains (part 1)" in the August 1991 Word Ways.

Vowel Rotation, Hugh Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

In the Aug 1999 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe presented two lists of words containing all 120 permutations of AEIOU. Here is how such a collection can be woven into a story. Can one be done in English?

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 32 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Abcde In Dutch, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

Susan Thorpe (Word Ways, Feb 1999) asks which of the 120 permutations of ABCDE occur in words. In the context of Word Ways I thought this meant "English word (or name" so I was surprised to see the German verb abdecken and the Polish word abecadto in her list. Surely, French verb abceder (suppurate).

Knight's-Tourlettersquares, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article, I present a new subject for logological study: the knight's-tour letter square. Such a square is constructed by first creating a knight's tour on the chessboard, in which each square of the chessboard is visited exactly once by successive knight's moves. Normally, knight's tours are displayed by numbering the squares of the chessboard with the numbers 1 through 64 to show the knight's path.

Aeiou: A Thirty-Year Quest, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

My FAVOURITE words are those in which the five vowels A.E.I.O and U each occur just once. They are referred to as AEIOU words. Over the last thirty years, Word Ways contributors have tried to find examples of these words to satisfy all 120 permutations of the five vowels. Whilst it is relatively easy to find several examples for many of the permutations, for others it is a struggle to find even one. Here, to begin with, is the story of the AEIOU quest.

Furry Dale, David Galef

Word Ways

Won spondee dime dearest ladle gull caul goalie lox. Shill lift mirror beg florist. Wan moaning, goalie lox when tinter florist in sora clottage. "Myra tan ice clottage!" sheathe ought. "Eye single grow incite." Once cinder cottage, goalie lox Caesar bola barge. Goalie lox liquor mouse. Sheep purred barge inter mouse teller ball whiz empathy. Awl sewed heiress media bola barge onus eyed, en shade olive id. Denture scene udder bola barge, ladle ball, innate duress. Allah barge mater fulfill entire. Shoe auk entity bet rune inlay honor bet. In new I'll shoe is no ring.

Alphomic Phrases, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In "Alphomes" in the August 1995 Word Ways, I proposed and defined the term alphome as a set of alphabetically-ordered letters of which at least one arrangement is a word. Some words, like BEEFILY, have their letters already arranged in alphabetical order and in these cases the word and its alphome are one and the same.

Some Properties Of One, Two, Three..., Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article we explore some properties of the number names: the results of looking at the names of order, or looking at the whole string ONE, TWO, THREE, ...

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Yes, We Have No Ascenders (Part 1), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As I get older, I seem to have more problems reading words I have written quickly, as sequences like "muvuw" become just one wavy line. I wondered what was the longest word that I would represent as a wavy line, and what was the longest wavy-line sequence as part of a word. The letters involved are those with no ascendents or descenders, i.e. aceimnorsuvwxzs. (Actually, I write 'z' with a descender, but that's not how it's printed.) The 'i' is included despite the giveaway dot because, in hurried writing, the dot appears in a rather random position above the wavy …

Tic-Tac-Toe Played As A Word Game!, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

In Problem 48 in Your Move (McGraw-Hill, 1971), David Silverman described a linguistic version of tic-tac-toe consisting of a stockpile of the words ARMY, CHAT, FISH, GIRL, HORN, KNIT, SOUP, SWAN and VOTE. Players alternately selected words, and the first to collect three words sharing a common letter is the winner.

The Gettysburg Distress, Mike Maguire

Word Ways

The following was constructed by rearranging the 1154 letters of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

A New Kind Of Transposal Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In my article "Single and Double Transposal Squares" in the May 1980 Word Ways, I generalized the concept of word square, allowing one to rearrange the letters in each row and column to form a word. Double transposal squares of size three are ridiculously easy to construct. The one on the left below is perhaps the commonest one, consisting of six words each having more than a thousand occurrences in Kucera and Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967): man 1207, him 2619, its 1858, was 9816, who 2252, not 4609.

Edith Plays Word Treblecross, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

Ordinary Treblecross is played by two persons who alternately place the same symbol, a cross, on a 1-by-n strip of squares with the winner being the first player to complete a row of three consecutive crosses. In his very readable book Fair Game (Comap, 1989) Richard K. Guy observes "that it's stupid to play next, or next-but-one, to a cross that's already been made: your opponent could complete three consecutive crosses immediately." Guy continues his study of the game by showing that Treblecross is equivalent to the combinatorial game Nim. Readers of Word Ways may recall the use of Nim …