Digital Commons Network^™

Wordplay By Computer: Two Early Views, Robert Cass Keller

Word Ways

The computer plays an increasingly important role in recreational linguistics. it has already been used for

*rearrangement of the dictionary: grouping together words having the same set of letters (ESCORT, CORSET), words with the same letter pattern (EXCESS, BAMBOO) or words with the same letter in a specified position (hoNey, maNna, wiNds,...)

*dictionary searches for words with certain properties, such as a specific trigram (camoUFLage, genUFLect) or a specific set of four letters (opHtHalmopHtHisis)

*construction of specialized word groups, such as double-six or single-seven word squares, pangram sets, or high-scoring Boggle grids.

Medes In The Marsupium, Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

The ancient world had to deal with its Media, that savage land whence came barbarians to ravage the neighboring empires. We, in turn, have our Media with their unstories celebrating sweat-freaks charged with carrying or propelling balls of differing sizes and shapes from an improbable point of departure to an even more improbable destination, detailing drug busts of jet-setters and car makers, and chronicling the concubinages, miscarriages, and splits of movie and TV facemakers distinguished primarily by busts of another kind. Therefore on a recent warm and oppressive afternoon in an attempt to escape for a time the attacks of …

A Surname Saga, Derek Pell

Word Ways

HAFIZ on my way to the LONDON POST ORPHEUS to MAILER a LEVERTOV to MAUGHAM. As I PAZ through the PARKER, my BACH began AIKEN. I SATIE down on a nearby BENCHLEY, first MENCKEN SCHORER it was DREISER. An INGE of SNOW had fallen recently - - HAILE REMARQUEaBOLL for the MIDDLETON of JUNO - - and there was a CRISP TRILLIN DEVRIES.

Another Vocabularyclept Poem, J. A. Lindon

Word Ways

In a Vocabularyclept poem, the constructor (in this case, J. A. Lindon) is supplied with an alphabetically - arranged list of words from a poem by the originator (in this case, Howard Bergerson) ; his task is to reassemble these words into a more-or-less meaningful poem. Earlier examples of these reconstructions by Lindon, Bergerson, and the editor appear in the May 1969 and August 1970 issues of Word Ways. Unfortunately, the two poems given below are not quite identical; Bergerson erroneously supplied 'lightening' for 'lighning' in the word-list.

The Logologist's Love Letter, Richard M. Lederer

Word Ways

The following letter was written by Richard Lederer after a fight with his wife-to-be, Carol, when he was a student at Yale and she at Pembroke. Note that it contains no repeated words.

An 1800-Point Scrabble Turn?, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

In SCRABBLE® crossword game (hereafter referred to simply as SCRABBLE), playing all seven tiles at once entitles one to a 50-point bonus, which, when added to the score for the word(s) formed, often results in a single turn of 70 points or more. Even 100-point turns can occur when the tiles are played on one or more premium squares which double or triple the values of letters or words. Theoretically, in fact, well over 1,000 points are possible when seven tiles are added in key positions to eight tiles already on the board to produce several words including a 15-letter …

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 that issue.

Three Word Square Contests (Part 2), Helen Motamen

Word Ways

In the second word contest sponsored by the Girl Scout magazine Daisy for kids under twelve, the grid size grew as well as the challenge. Contestants now had to fill in a 4-by-4 grid with letters of their choice and find the ten longest words that could be spelled without moving in any directio between letters (up, down, right, left, or diagonal) as in a game of Boggle. No letter in the grid could be used more than once per word, and all of the words had to be different. The value of each of the ten words depended on …

Scottish Occupations, Boris Randolph

Word Ways

According to Social Security records, the most common Scottish Macs are MacDonald (57 thousand), MacKenzie (18 thousand) and MacKay (11 thousand). Any telephone directory will reveal many others, but I suspect that few people have encountered the following Macs and their appropriate occupations:

Wordplay Miniatures, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In this article, we introduce Word Ways readers to the wordplay miniature -- a special form of the familiar crossword puzzle. In the title, the term miniature refers to its size; all puzzles presented below are square arrays consisting of five horizontal five-letter words intersected by five vertical five-letter words. (Because of the simplicity of this array, we have deemed it unnecessary to supply the puzzler with a grid of squares to be filled in for each puzzle; a blank sheet of paper should be adequate.)

Pseudoredundancy, Merlin X. Houdini Iv

Word Ways

In the November 1982 Kickshaws, Edward Wolpow asked readers to supply pseudoredundant expressions of the form "BORN NATAL, South Africa" and "COLORFUL COLORADO" from the real world. There are many such groups of words, and the list can be further extended if non-dictionary phrases similar to his "When will BEGIN START peace talks?" are allowed.

Four Anagram Challenges, Hearst Sill Rogers

Word Ways

In the November 1981 Word Ways, Eric Albert suggested four short phrases for readers to rearrange into apposite expressions. Six readers responded with one or more examples: Len Elliott of Auburn WA, Jeremy Morse of London, England, Anthony Sebastian of San Francisco CA, David Schulman of New York NY, Edward R. Wolpow of Brookline MA and Jeff Grant of Hastings, New Zealand.

Strange Origins, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Etymologies are strange and uncertain things. Does the game of TENNIS get its naame from the French tenez 'hold on', or from Tinnis, a place in Lower Egypt which makes cloth such as covers tennis balls? Nobody knows. (However, French did give us LOVE, from l'oeuf 'the egg', drawn like a zero.) With the examples that follow, you can be sure that the modern English word derives from the rather odd ball of thread I give you to trace the word back to its origin. How many of the 25 word origins can you decipher (another word related to zero)? …

Acronyms Of Ailment, Willard R. Epsy

Word Ways

Profanity, obscenity and violence are slipping into medical terminology and phraseology unobtrusively through the back door of the acronymal abbreviation. When quoted as an acronym, coronary artery disease becumes an insulting CAD, secondary carcinoma of the upper mediastinum turns into SCUM, thyroid uptake gradient transforms into THUG, and right atrial pressure elevation transmutes into RAPE. Medical papers abound in such vulgarisms as GIP (gonorrheal invasive peritonitis), HOG (hepatic output of glucose), IMP (idiopathic myeloid proliferation) and HOOD (hyperbaric oxygen ongoing delivery).

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions for the puzzles in this issue.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors who wish to contribute to Word Ways.

Kickshaws, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 16 Number 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information including a table of contents.

Digital Verse, John Henrick

Word Ways

The English poets have taken an amiguous posture with regard to digital verse. On the one hand, they appear to delight in referring to the product of their craft as "numbers". Examples abound. In A Psalm of Life Longfellow wrote,

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!

Homophony, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

A homophone is a word or phrase pronounced like another word or phrase, but different in meaning and possibly in derivation as well, as DONE/DUN or BITE/BIGHT/BYTE. Not long ago, I realized that a large number of homophones could be constructed on the word ROSES, particularly if punctuation as well as spelling were used to distinguish among the various examples:

-the presence or absence of a capital letter, as illustrated by the girl's name (Rose) and the flower (rose)
-the presence or absence of an apostrophe, as in a simple plural (roses), the genitive of a singular noun (Rose's), and …

No-Dictionary Scrabble Revisited, Stephen C. Root

Word Ways

In the November 1974 Word Ways, Ralph Beaman constructed a Scrabble game scoring 5609 points, assuming that any combination of letters formed a word. Using the diagram below, Stephen Root devised a game scoring 5874 points. By rearranging Stephen Root's moves, Charles F. Brown of Albuquerque raised the score two more points, to 5876.

Words On Triangular Pavements, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In an earlier Word Ways article, I constructed a variety of 'hexword' patterns by inscribing letters in individual hexagonal tiles to form three-letter words for each group of tiles meeting at a common point. This article considers the analogous problem for pavements of equilateral triangles. Six adjacent triangular tiles form a hexagon with rays meeting at a central point; thus, letters inscribed on these tiles can be combined to form six-letter words arranged around this point.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.

Naming The Animals, Rufus T. Strohm

Word Ways

The following logological fable is one of a series written by Rufus T. Strohm, editor of the National Puzzlers League from 1923 to 1953. It was originally published in The Enigma in the December 1943 issue.

An Anagram Composing Contest, Eric Albert

Word Ways

With the exception of palindromes, anagrams are the most difficult kind of word puzzle to compose. The base phrase and the anagram must contain exactly the same letters, and the anagram must be apposite. The criteria for a "perfect" anagram are much stricter still: the anagram must agree in tense and number, precisely describe the base, and contain no filler such as exclamations, unrelated proper names, or irrelevant adjectives.

The Highest N-Move Scrabble Scores, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

The May 1982 Kickshaws presented a two-move SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game by Gyles Brandreth scoring 314 points and 348 points. Darryl Francis, the Kickshaws editor, wondered whether further improvement might be possible, and generalized the problem to the highest n-move Scrabble game.

Business English?, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

"Business English" was once a term for simple, no-frills communication, English with its sleeves rolled up for action. Now it means obfuscatory circumlocutions pussyfooting periphrasis, "and etc.," to use a phrase I keep encountering in the writing of MBAs. Let's see if you are executive timber, middle-management material. Can you create business jargon to substitute for each of these simple phrases? Some suggestions appear in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

The Monosyllable Machine (Part 3), Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

"Ah," sighed the furry phascolome after a few atavistic gruntlets upon degustation of the emerald cake masterpiece, "we owe a lot to the Crusaders!"

A Palindromic Alphabetic Insertion, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

An alphabetic insertion occurs when each letter of the alphabet is inserted in turn in the same position within an n-letter word, forming 26 new words of length n+1. Alphabetic insertions are extremely difficult to find, even for the simplest case in which letters are in tern inserted in the center of a two-letter word. As a practical matter, the only alphabetic insertions with any hope of success are those in which the original word consists of two vowels; letting x and y stand for vowels, the 26 words sought are of the form xay, xby, xcy, …

Three Word Square Contests (Part 1), Helen Motamen

Word Ways

About two years ago when I was nine years old and my brother Mark was eleven, we teamed up to enter a series of three contests for kids under twelve sponsored by my Girl Scout magazine, Daisy.