Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Linguistics (4053)
- Linguistic (845)
- Puzzles (38)
- Palindromes (34)
- Puzzle (29)
-
- Quiz (29)
- Transposals (15)
- Games (13)
- Puns (13)
- Anagrams (10)
- Poem (9)
- Poems (9)
- Word puzzle (9)
- Mathematics (8)
- Poetry (8)
- Homophones (6)
- Transpositions (6)
- Alice in Wonderland (5)
- Crossword (5)
- Obituary (5)
- Project (5)
- Word-play (5)
- Alphametics (4)
- Butler University (4)
- Lewis Carroll (4)
- Magic Squares (4)
- Martin Gardner (4)
- G4G (3)
- Gathering for Gardner (3)
- Humor (3)
- Publication Year
- File Type
Articles 3541 - 3570 of 4911
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Instructions To Authors
Word Ways
Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to the publication.
Double Entendre Headlines, Eugene Ulrich
Double Entendre Headlines, Eugene Ulrich
Word Ways
While I was calmly reading the newspaper the other day, this headline near the bottom of the page caught my eye: JOHNNY, JUNE CASH ARE HIT IN HUNGARY. Had they been pelted with rotten tomatoes by a restive audience, or with bricks by protestors in the streets? (A modern civilized population has various ways of expressing its feelings.) Or had they been bashed by a car on the highway, or beaned by a meteorite? When I read the article, it was a surprise (and no small relief) to learn that their concerts in Hungary had been a big success.
A Supplementary Topical Index
Word Ways
The following index has been designed to help the reader locate specific types of wordplay published in 26 issues of Word Ways from February 1978 through May 1984; it updates a similar index for 40 issues of Word Ways from February 1968 through November 1977 appearing in the February 1978 issue. Both indices use the same format: a logological core consisting of (1) letter-patterns in words, (2) operations upon letters in words, and (3) relationships between letters and sounds, and a periphery (the intersection of logology with other branches of wordplay) consisting of (1) literary wordplay and games, (2) academic …
Front Cover And Publication Information
Front Cover And Publication Information
Word Ways
Publication information including table of contents.
The Maori Rolls, Jeff Grant
The Maori Rolls, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
In New Zealand a general election is held every three years, and it is compulsory for all qualified persons to be registered on an electoral roll. The country is divided up into 75 electorates, each containing about 20,000 eligible voters. There are at present over two million people recorded on the rolls, which are being continually updated to show new electors, changes of address, changes of name by marriage, and so on. The electoral rolls are published in soft-cover book form and can be inspected at most libraries and Post Offices throughout New Zealand. There is a National Microfiche Index …
Novelty Forms: A Satire, Newton B. Lovejoy
Novelty Forms: A Satire, Newton B. Lovejoy
Word Ways
Late in the last century, forms (solid crossword arrays with various geometrical outlines) were frequently found in puzzle columns in magazines and newspapers. Constructors soon tired of standard outlines such as squares, diamonds and pyramids, and developed a variety of more exotic ones: stars, crosses, pentagons, enneagons, hurglasses and the like. Two hundred and nine different shapes (including minor variants) can, in fact, be found in the 1906 Key to Puzzledom, a guide to the best in word puzzle literature up to that time. Alas, every excess creates its own reaction; the following satire is an abridgement of an …
Novelty Forms: Two Examples, Walter Shedlofsky
Novelty Forms: Two Examples, Walter Shedlofsky
Word Ways
In the last fifty years, the construction of novelty forms (solid crossword arrays with unusual outlines) has almost died out. Three examples have appeared in previous issues of Word Ways: Palmer Peterson's Hollow Diamond (May 1971) and Armless Man (Feb 1980), and Walter Shedlofsky's Windmill (Aug 1973). (The latter occasionally appears in the Enigma, the monthly publication of the National Puzzler's League.) The two Linking Word Squares forms depicted below are believed to be new. Three is nothing exactly like them in puzzle literature; the closest analogues are the Cushion Square and the Hollow Diamond. Note that all …
Olympic Roots And Branches, A. Ross Eckler
Olympic Roots And Branches, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
In the February 1984 Word Ways, Darryl Francis presented a quiz based on words whose letters can be rearranged to form OLYMPIC and one other word. Believing that the Olympics deserve further logological celebration, I present in this article an application of "Word Roots and Branches", described in the August 1979 issue Word Ways. Briefly, a word root consists of a diagram showing how a word can be transdeleted to shorter words in single steps (in a single step transdeletion, one letter is removed from a word and the remainder rearranged to form a new word). For many …
The Middle Of An Alphabetic List, Alan Frank
The Middle Of An Alphabetic List, Alan Frank
Word Ways
What's the middle of the alphabet? It's HA to a cryptic crossword aficionado, and M or N by strict counting, but what if you look in the middle of a reference book? The answer depends a lot on which book you choose. Here are fifty examples.
Colloquy
Word Ways
Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections, and comments about earlier articles appearing in Word Ways. Comments received up to a month prior to publication of an issue will appear in it.
Curiously Concealed Cities, Dmitri A. Borgmann
Curiously Concealed Cities, Dmitri A. Borgmann
Word Ways
Interested examination discloses that many well-known English words and phrases contain the names of equally well-known cities, either American or foreign. Embedded in the word DRAINAGE, for example, is READING (Pennsylvania), its letters rearranged and an A added. In the same way, the phrase AN OBLONG disguises BOLOGNA (Italy), the single letter added here being an N.
Peripatetic Words, Maxey Brooke
Peripatetic Words, Maxey Brooke
Word Ways
English is perhaps the most mongrel of languages; Spanish and Swahili are the nearest runners-up. Unlike the French, who try to keep their language pure, the English gloat in this mongrelization. In the beginning they had foreign words imposed upon them by conquerors. They have borrowed words from practically every language in Europe except Lithuanian. They have borrowed words from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Polynesia. They have compounded many of these words without regard to their origin (automobile, for example, is a Greek-Latin compound), and they are continuously inventing new words like xerox, googol and blurb …
The Letter Rebus (Part 3), A. Ross Eckler
The Letter Rebus (Part 3), A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
This article continues the survey of the letter rebus begun in the February 1984 Word Ways; readers should refer to that issue for a general discussion including taxonomy.
Kickshaws, Edward R. Wolpow
Kickshaws, Edward R. Wolpow
Word Ways
Kickshaws is currently being assembled by a series of guest editors. All contributions should be sent to the editor in Morristown, New Jersey.
A Tale Of Two Crossword Dictionaries, William Sunners
A Tale Of Two Crossword Dictionaries, William Sunners
Word Ways
Ever since the American mania for crossword puzzles began with the publication of the first crossword puzzle book in 1924, many authors have compiled crossword dictionaries as an aid to the harassed solver. I have collected many of these books during the past sixty years, but until recently never tried to infer anything about the sources these authors used from a comparison of their entries with other works.
Limits Of The Human Life Cycle, John Henrick
Limits Of The Human Life Cycle, John Henrick
Word Ways
The cosmetology of cliches is commonly regarded as an art not so much black as dismal, comparable to the refurbishment of rubbish. Yet, when the underlying concept of the cliche is sufficiently fundamental and compelling, it is not unusual for a phrase that has grown contemptible through familiarity to be reconditioned in popular usage with the aid of such standard devices as metonymy, metaphor, alliteration and rhyme.
More Tetragram Permutations, Tom Pulliam
More Tetragram Permutations, Tom Pulliam
Word Ways
In the May 1984 issue of Word Ways, the editor presented Websterian words containing tetragrams consisting of all 24 permutations of the letter-sets AIRT, AIST, and AGIR. He commented "there may be additional letter-sets that can be fully permuted into tetragram-embeddable Websterian words" because of the incomplete nature of the Thomas-Kassler-Wooley legal tetragram list. Indeed there are; I exhibit below three more tetragram permutations.
Upscale Synonyms, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Upscale Synonyms, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Word Ways
Pick up this quiz and don't pass up the opportunity to pony up with the synonyms for the following expressions, all of which have up in them. If you come up with more than half of them, consider yourself up to the challenge and feel up about it. In some cases there are may be up to two or three possible answers but what I'm up to demands that you ante up with the commonest answer. OK, now it's up to you, and I hope you're up to it. Up up and away!
Instructions To Authors
Word Ways
Instructions to authors who wish to contribute to Word Ways.
Front Cover And Publication Information -- Volume 17, Number 2
Front Cover And Publication Information -- Volume 17, Number 2
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.
Analyzing Wiretaps, Jeff Grant
Analyzing Wiretaps, Jeff Grant
Word Ways
In the February 1982 Word Ways, Darryl Francis attempted to form words out of the 255 different subsets of letters from the set NEUSTRIA. There were eight gaps in his list; two, SRT and TRN, were filled in the February 1983 Colloquy as placenames in Yugoslavia. After considerable searching, I was able to plug three more holes.
Come Wade, Dear Maid, Cynthia Knight
Come Wade, Dear Maid, Cynthia Knight
Word Ways
The following dialogue (except for italicized words) is written entirely with words consisting of the US Post Office two-letter statename abbreviations. In the May 1976 Word Ways, Darryl Francis listed 130 such words that he found in Webster's Pocket Dictionary, plus over 50 words eight letters or longer from Webster's Second or Third editions (the longest, CACOGALACTIA).
A Sound-Alike Dictionary, A. Ross Eckler
A Sound-Alike Dictionary, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Alan Frank's article, "Consonant-Characterized Words," is related to a topic of considerable logological interest, that of characterizing spoken words by their consonantal sounds. This is best illustrated by rearranging the 150 words that he found containing the consonants NRST plus an assortment of vowels into 24 groups, one for each possible order of consonants. Within each group, words have been arranged by increasing number of syllables.
Names On The Border, Edward R. Wolpow
Names On The Border, Edward R. Wolpow
Word Ways
In H. L. Mencken's The American Language (Knopf, 1977), a reissue of the 1936 fourth edition and the 1945 and 1948 supplements, there is a brief discussion of United States towns whose names reflect their location on state or national borders. These names are often compounded from the names of the two or three b ordering states. This article is a new look at these old names, and a review of more recent atlases for newer ones.
An Olympic Quiz, 1984 Style, Darryl Francis
An Olympic Quiz, 1984 Style, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
The August 1976 Word Ways carried a quiz of mine entitled "An Olympic Quiz". In it, I offered sixty words, each of which could be added to the letters of OLYMPIC, and then transposed to create a new word or term.
The Letter Rebus (Part 2), A. Ross Eckler
The Letter Rebus (Part 2), A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
This article continues the survey of the letter rebus begun in the February 1984 Word Ways; readers should refer to that issue for a general discussion including taxonomy.
An Elaborate Medieval Mnemonic, John Henrick
An Elaborate Medieval Mnemonic, John Henrick
Word Ways
Every schoolboy is familiar with such memory aids as ROY G BIV for the colors of the rainbow or FACE for the interlineal notes of the treble clef. Far fewer people are aware of an elaborate but tightly-constructed mnemonic used in an earlier era to remember the various forms of the syllogism. To review, a syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.
Reaganagrams, Mike Morton, A. Ross Eckler
Reaganagrams, Mike Morton, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Anagramming presidential names - rearranging their letters into other words, hopefully bearing some relation to the individual - has been a word pastime for many generations; the February 1977 issue of Word Ways summarizes the best (that is, the most apropos) anagrams for all the presidents from Washington through Carter. However, it is likely that no US president has a more readily anagrammable name than RONALD WILSON REAGAN - eighteen letters well-distributed between seven vowels and eleven consonants, with W the only unusual letter. A large number of his predecessors are saddled with the rare letters J, Z, V or …
The Apple-Sauce Chronicles, Louis Phillips
The Apple-Sauce Chronicles, Louis Phillips
Word Ways
In this issue, Word Ways introduces a new column which will appear from time to time under the above name, containing a variety of light-hearted wordplay sent by Louis Phillips to a circle of friends. Although in the original different genres are mixed higgledy-piggledy, here an attempt is made to present unified themes in the spirit of Mary Ann Madden's New York Magazine column.