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Articles 2641 - 2670 of 4911
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A Note On 3-Dimensional Graphs, Leonard Gordon
A Note On 3-Dimensional Graphs, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
Tetrahedron stacking, illustrated below, is a spherical close packing that is identical to cannonball stacking. It neither dominates nor is dominated by two-dimensional k-graphing or s-graphing (discussed in my Feb 1995 Word ways article).
Sisyphus And The Rockettes, Susan Klinke
Sisyphus And The Rockettes, Susan Klinke
Word Ways
Sisyphus was sentenced by the gods to roll that rock up the hill for all eternity only to see it roll back down. So, was he condemned to a life in vain because no effort on his part could ever get that rock over the top? I think he eventually replaced that impossible goal with a different one: the sport (or the art?) of playfully testing the limits of a prison he knew he could never escape. By redefining his task, he made his condemnation work for him: he suffused it with form and meaning.
Japanese Heist-Slang, Peter Constantine
Japanese Heist-Slang, Peter Constantine
Word Ways
Iceman, crasher, penny-weigher, sniper, jackroller, screwman, hugger-mugger, thief; take a group of average Americans on a linguistic underworld tour of the South Bronx, and they would throw up their hands in despair at the unintelligible, fast-flying words that snipe from street and even the most tongue-tied will begin to pick up the street jargon as they meet the local in-crowd.
Alphomes, Susan Thorpe
Alphomes, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Crossword aficionados, in order to solve anagrams, can arrange the letters of the problem word in strict alphabetical order and then consult references such as an anagram dictionary in which the alphabetically-ordered sets of letters are themselves arranged in alphabetical order. Each entry lists one or more words that can be formed from the particular ingenuity of its title.
Glenelg: History Of A Palindrome, Dan Tilque
Glenelg: History Of A Palindrome, Dan Tilque
Word Ways
It lies in an obscure corner of Scotland, facing the Isle of Skye across the Sound of Sleat. It's accessible only by a single road across the steep Highland hills. It's a remote Highland town that would be totally uninteresting to anyone but it's inhabitants except for the symmetry of its name: GLENELG.
Extending Francis
Word Ways
In the May 1995 Word Ways, Darryl Francis gave examples of words having every numberical score of 1 (a) to 24B (superstitiously), and challenged readers to come up with a word scoring 249. Leonard Gordon suggested pyknodysostotics, pericardiomiastinitis, electroencephalographers, hexanitrodiphenylamine ... all but the first and last in Webster's Second or Third or inferrable form it.
New Punctuation, New Meaning, David G. Armstrong
New Punctuation, New Meaning, David G. Armstrong
Word Ways
Walsh's Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Lippincott, 1892) relates the more-or-less apocryphal story of the soldier who asked an oracle if it were safe to go off to war. He chose to interpret the oracle's reply (Ibis redibis no moreiris in bello) with a comma after redibis which, translated, means "You will go, you will return, you will not die in battle: but as he lay dying on the battlefield he realized that the message could instead be read with the comma after non: "You will go, you will return not, you will die in battle."
Some More Quality 8-Squares, Richard Sabey
Some More Quality 8-Squares, Richard Sabey
Word Ways
The following regular eight-squares are the result of a computer search using the Air Force list of words from Webster's Second New International Dictionary and from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD), together with some inflections from Chambers English Dictionary. There are 45,594 words in the list; 315 squares were found.
Non-Transitive Word Games, Jeremiah Farrell
Non-Transitive Word Games, Jeremiah Farrell
Word Ways
"Longer than" is a binary relation R on the set of words with the property that whenever a R b and b R c, we always have a R c. Such relations are called transitive and examples abound: "shorter than", "precedes lexicographically", "scores higher in Scrabble than", etc." Transitive relations often impose a kind of "can you top this" attitude among logologists: "what is the longest word you know?" In this article we wish to avoid transitive relations, and instead play word games that have no "best" answer.
Words That Never Stray, Richard Lederer, Al Greengold
Words That Never Stray, Richard Lederer, Al Greengold
Word Ways
Hoping to make some clean lucre, we're going to get a discussion in edgewise about a special category of words. Unless we give this topic long shift, we'll be in rotten fettle and guilty of immoral turpitude. Please don't hurl aspersions at these words. We'd prefer that your dander and hackles be down. Rather feeling luke cool, you'll be waiting until bated curiosity.
Tenno's Sonnet, Jeff Grant
Tenno's Sonnet, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
Albert Tenno was born in Notton, Yorkshire on 8th August 1888. Some locals claim his father was an Italian immigrant named Alberto Tennoni who come from the town of Onano, northwest of Rome. Others believe that Tenno is an old English name related to Tenny or Tennock. There is no evidence to confirm either story.
A Pair Of Pears Posers, Peter Newby
A Pair Of Pears Posers, Peter Newby
Word Ways
In the May 1995 issue of Word Ways, I drew your attention to one of the problem words of the English language, SERICON, and proposed a tongue-in-cheek solution. Now, wearing a more serious hat, I -ish to mention two other literary grey areas and appeal to you for help in clarifying the situation. In addition to the mystery of SERICON, Pears Advanced Word-Puzzler's Dictionary (Pelham Books, 1987) also confessed ignorance in two of its other entries; I quote directly from pages 574 and 749, respectively.
Double Or Nothing, Barry Duncan
Double Or Nothing, Barry Duncan
Word Ways
On the left is a word that has had its doubled letters removed; on the right is a clue to help you put the word back together (for example, the answer to "HAY working on the farm brings him joy" is HAPPY. Be warned that some words have more than one pair of doubled letters.
The Palindromic Slide Rule, David Morice
The Palindromic Slide Rule, David Morice
Word Ways
The Palindromic Slide Rule makes palindromes--ten thousand of them. To set it up, photocopy the four boards labeled A, B, C and D on the outside back cover. After cutting them out, place the A board on the table, and lay the B board on the A board, positioning it between the two columns of words.
Ethnic Onomastics, Thomas L. Bernard
Ethnic Onomastics, Thomas L. Bernard
Word Ways
Generally speaking, even those with only a mild interest in onomastics feel that they can usually pinpoint the national or ethnic origin of individuals imply by hearing their names. This becomes doubly so when the first and last names fall into the same presumed stereotypical category. For example, who would fail to recognize that Werner Schmidt was of German background or that Erin O'Flaherty was Irish?
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
A Remarkable Revelation?, A. Ross Eckler, Darryl Francis
A Remarkable Revelation?, A. Ross Eckler, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Abstract unavailable.
You're Likely To Be Clipped, Howard Richler
You're Likely To Be Clipped, Howard Richler
Word Ways
In Hamlet, Polonius tells King Claudius that "brevity is the soul of wit". If we can believe that the results of a biblical study, it is also the soul of English. The number of syllables different languages require to translate the Gospel according to Mark were compared. Here are the results: English, 29,000; Teutonic languages (average), 32,650; French, 36,500; Slavic languages (average); 36,500; Romance languages (average), 40,200; Indo-Iranian languages (average), 43,100.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 28 Issue 2
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 28 Issue 2
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Packing The Cardinals, Leonard Gordon
Packing The Cardinals, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
Take the integers ONE through TEN, and pack them as compactly as possible in three formats: crossword, word-search, and king's move. The best answers appear to be
Yet More Mixed Reviews, A. Ross Eckler
The States We're In, Richard Lederer
The States We're In, Richard Lederer
Word Ways
Celebrated June 14, Flag Day commemorates the adoption by the Continental Congress of the Stars and Stripes in 1777 as the official flag of America. The thirteen stripes on the flag represent the original colonies and the fifty stars the united states of the United States.
Chemical Improvements, Edward R. Wolpow
Chemical Improvements, Edward R. Wolpow
Word Ways
I recently purchased a Franklin Crosswords Puzzle Solver (Model CW-40). It is startling to look at this object, the size of a playing card, and watch it carry out tedious searches from an enormous Merriam-Webster vocabulary, with a button-press.
Real Word Squares, Leonard Gordon
Real Word Squares, Leonard Gordon
Word Ways
Here are word squares made up of 3-frag words, Taking 165,000 words from length 9 through 13, I found that 5,780 can be broken into 3 common-word fragments. They use 2,578 of the 7,1000 2,3,4 and 5-letter allowed frags to produce 21 squares.
A Word-Watcher's Abecedary, Christopher Mcmanus
A Word-Watcher's Abecedary, Christopher Mcmanus
Word Ways
We folk etymologists have a cardinal rule: never look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary! One can invariably guess their meaning by context and syllabic division alone. Besides, only by this method could anyone intuit the nature of eponymous creatures such as the following.
Compound Fractions, Peter Newby
Compound Fractions, Peter Newby
Word Ways
The Oxford English Dictionary defines logology as "the science of word" and Dmitri Borgmann playfully adopted the term to describe certain aspects of his wordsmithery. Since then, it appears to have been misapplied to all and every form of recreational linguistics. I feel that, in the Borgmann tradition, it should be restricted to the pseudo-academic wordplay that the founding editor of Word Ways pioneered so brilliantly, but "not" at the expense of the conventional word-based arguments he also graced with his genius, nor any other inventive wordplay which came from his impish pen.