Digital Commons Network^™

Single-Letter Surnames, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

For the logologist, the study of American surnames is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because there are 1.3 million different names now in existence, frustrating because there is no single reference work listing them. The nearest approximation to a reference work is the telephone directory, but the search for a rare name there can be a tedious one: there are thousands of different directories, and most of the smaller ones contain separate alphabetical listings for each town or telephone exchange. And, alas, most names are rare -- Social Security records in 1974 indicate that about 450,000 surnames were held by …

Distill It, Sid, Chaim Fleischman

Word Ways

In this quiz the answer to each clue is a palindrome; to aid in the solution, word-divisions and all vowels are given. The first letters of all thirteen palindromes will spell out another palindrome when read from top to bottom. Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Falalalala-Lala-La-La, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Honolulu Lulu lullabied her baby and greeted the elderly lady from Nassau, "Whom may you be?"

Who Done It?, Frank A. Magary

Word Ways

Hans Sten, president of the firm of Sten, Willems, and Milsap, is found dead at his desk by his housekeeper, Mrs. Lehr. Police established that he died of slow poisoning from something in his after-dinner coffee. Being a puzzle fanatic, and a devoted reader of Word Ways, Hans could not resist leaving a puzzle to reveal the identity of his murderer.

The Most One-Sided Scrabble Game, Prince Joli Kansil

Word Ways

In the August 1981 issue of Word Ways, Alan Frank presented several ultra-low-scoring Scrabble games. This article follows up by asking: what is the widest disparity of score possible between two players? Below is a set-up game I created years ago in which the difference in scores is more than 1900; however, I am sure avid Scrabblers can improve on this number. All of the words can be found in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (Second Edition).

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.

English Field Names, Jay Ames

Word Ways

England is an onomastician's paradise: over the years, detailed studies of many different kinds of English names have been compiled and published. English place names have been previously discussed in Word Ways; in addition, it has reviewed books of house names, surnames and personal nicknames. But did you know that the English have also made a practice of naming all the pieces of land forming part of the agrarian economy of a village? These 'field names', as they are called, have been quite thoroughly documented by the appropriately-named John Field in English Field Names: A Dictionary, issued in many …

Creating Consonant Strings, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

In Dave Silverman's list of abstemious words in the February 1972 Kickshaws, the most abstemious was CRWTH (pronounced 'crooth'). For those of you who don't know, an abstemious word is one without vowels.

Side-O-Graphs, Boris Randolph

Word Ways

In each of the eight puzzles presented below, each line contains three definitions. Find a word satisfying the first definition; drop a letter from this word and rearrange the other letters to form a word satisfying the second definition; drop a letter from this word and rearrange the other letters to form a word satisfying the third definition. Place the first dropped letter in the parentheses at the left end of the line, and the second dropped letter in the parentheses at the right end of the line. When you have correctly solved all the lines in a puzzle, the …

Sherlockian Anagrams, Dana Richards

Word Ways

Since I am both a Sherlock Holmes aficionado and a reader of Word Ways, it is no surprise that I became interested in constructing anagrams based on the titles of the Holmes stories or on the names of well-known characters in them.

Czech Words Containing Numbers, Stanislav Tvrdik

Word Ways

Many English number-names can be imbedded in words or split between two words; Martin Gardner exploited the latter idea in a Kickshaws quiz. Alternatively, the sounds of number-names can be embedded. Similar games can be played in Czech; in fact, writing short stories with numbers substituted in appropriate words is a common logological pastime. The following summary of Czech number-words was translated by Harry Partridge of Manhattan Beach, CA.

Neustria, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

If one selects eight different letters from the alphabet, they can be arranged in 8! = 40320 different ways. If one allows any subset of letters from 1 through 8 to be chosen, the number of arrangements increases from 8! + (8)7! + (8x7/2) 6! + ... + 8 = 109600. Obviously, no more than a tiny fraction of these arrangements is likely to form words, and choosing a set of eight letters and seeking to verify as many as possible as real words would be a lifetime's work.

Trapping The Light Fantastic, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

There are all sorts of new names for dances and many old ones too: ballet, bolero, Black Bottom, buck and wing, etc. Some names reveal old customs, some have amusing names, some are names easy to trace, and some offer unsolved puzzles to the etymologist. Here are some hints from which you are asked to provide the names of popular dances.

Palindromes With Central Pairs, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

A recent survey of over 1000 palindromes has shown that 71 per cent pivot on a single letter, as in SEXES, EVE and MESEM, whereas only 29 per cent have a double letter in the centre, as in TIBBIT, OPPO and REDDER. From the palindromes with an even number of letters I have selected 26, starting with AA and working through the alphabet to ZZ.

Kickshaws, Charles W. Bostick

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Punctuation Marks In Play Titles, Louis Phillips

Word Ways

In a recent article in the New York Times, Mickey Spillane -- the creator of that hard-hitting 1950s detective Mike Hammer -- discussed a forthcoming musical based upon his work, Oh, Mike! In the course of the discussion, the best-selling author observed "Any title with punctuation is fantastic." Now, Mr. Spillane is a shrewd man and I think he has a point. Indeed there is a recent trend to add exclamation marks to titles in order to elicit a sense of excitement. Oh! Calcutta!, for example, has two exclamation marks and a number of musicals, such as Fiorello!, …

Geometrical Patterns Of State Names, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most people are reasonably familiar with the two-letter abbreviations for state names introduced by the U.S. Postal Service a number of years ago. These abbreviations have occasionally been the subject of word play in past Word Ways issues: I connected them in a cross-word-style array in February 1976, Darryl Francis constructed words out of them in May 1976, and Philip Cohen programmed a computer to find a maximum-length chain of overlapping abbreviations in February 1977.

Morbid Musing, Jezebel Q. Xixx

Word Ways

From time to time, those of us who contribute to the pages of Word Ways turn to the subject of illness. Now is such a time!

Widow Wondering, John Campbell

Word Ways

Poor widows! Three out of four women survive their husbands. In some cultures remarriage is taboo. In other cultures the widow is (was) burned on the funeral pyre of her husband. Yet the word has made a major contribution to the language. The root sense of the word means 'divided from.' In card playing, a widow is an extra hand. In printing, a widow is a line separated from the rest of the text. The very poisonous black widow spider was so named because the female sometimes eats its mate. See if you can match up the following phrases with …

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of the issue, including instructions for authors.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Out-Of-Place Words In Webster's 2nd, William Sunners

Word Ways

For almost fifty years Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, has been the official authority in most word-building puzzle contests. This huge tome of 2987 pages is a veritable storehouse of information; the edition I own and treasure is actually an encyclopedia. My sympathetic wife first purchased it in 1933 from an unemployed father, and I paid for it in monthly installments. Those regular payments helped provide for some of his physical needs for a time, while the book's contents have nourished my mind all these years.

A Potpourri Of Palindromes, D.L. Polonsky

Word Ways

"Dogma is a deified evil," I stress
A madam on every lane
Vile, bad-egg uteruses run a store,
But I'm, alas, a senile fairy.

Trite As A Cliche, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

A cliche is a stale, commonplace, worn out word, phrase, or figure of speech that many speakers and writers fall into using out of hurry or sheer laziness.

English Is A Crazy Language, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

The English language is the most widely spoken in the history of our planet. The English language had acquired the largest vocabulary and the noblest literature in the history of the human race.

Nonetheless, English is a crazy language.

Reversible Word Squares, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most people are familiar with reversible overcoats; by turning them insight out, one gets two garments for the price of one. The logological equivalent of this is the reversible word square, a square array of letters that contains words when read in normal left-to-right and top-to-bottom fashion (as in a crossword puzzle), but also contains words when read right-to-left and bottom-to-top.

A Word Root Quiz, Lee A. Gilman

Word Ways

The twenty words listed below all contain the root loqu or locu, which is derived from the Latin loci, locutus, meaning ' to speak'. Can you match the words with the definitions at the right? Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

Diagonal Reversible Word Squares, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In the preceding Word Ways article, the editor defined and gave examples of various types of reversible word squares. An interesting and more complex variation of the reversible word square occurs when the main diagonals also form words which can be read from either the top or the base of the square. This adds a further four words to the totals possible in conventional reversible squares.

Barbadian Dialect, John Mcclellan

Word Ways

My wife Doris and I have spent several Winter vacations in Barbados, that delightful Caribbean island lying approximately at Latitude 13, a bit of information quite unnecessary to the average voyager who prefers to leave such details to the boat- and air-people whose proper business it is; nor is it our intention to trespass into the field of the travel agency. However, that low latitude indicates that Barbados is close enough to the Equator to guarantee decent weather in the Winter months.

Assorted Avocational Adventures, Amelia Austrian

Word Ways

Adults, an array, are abjectly abashed at alliteration's ancient appeal as attractive (and auspicious?) abracadabra. Another array abhors and abominates alliteration as airy artifice. An additional array appreciates and admires alliteration's artfulness, aptness, applicability, and adaptability.