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Scrambled Animals, Howard Pinckard, Charles O. Cunningham
Scrambled Animals, Howard Pinckard, Charles O. Cunningham
Word Ways
Like the "Animals in Disarray" puzzle in WORD WAYS (Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 145-146), this is an anagramming exercise involving the names of mammals - ranging from the entirely familiar to the admittedly unusual. Most of the really obscure or tricky items, however, are included in the "bonus" section at the end of the regular puzzle.
Letter To The Editor, D. A. Drury
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.
Anglo-Foreign Words, Walter Penney
Anglo-Foreign Words, Walter Penney
Word Ways
The following are five groups of English words. But they are also words from five foreign languages which have no connection with their English counterparts. What are the languages?
Convertible Acrostics, J. A. Lindon, Walter Shedlofsky
Convertible Acrostics, J. A. Lindon, Walter Shedlofsky
Word Ways
The following poems illustrate a novel prosodic concept. The first set - composed by J.A. Lindon - is a pair of poems which are mutually convertible, both with respect to their rhyme-schemes and with respect to the acrostical initial letters of their lines, wand which are also written entirely in monosyllables. The second set - composed by Walter Shedlofsky - is a set of three - not an acro-duplex, but an acro-triple. The members of this triad of poems are all mutually convertible, both acrostically and rhyme-schematically.
Polyomino Word-Puzzle Results, Donald A. Drury, J. A. Lindon
Polyomino Word-Puzzle Results, Donald A. Drury, J. A. Lindon
Word Ways
In our last issue we presented a near-solution to one of the pentomino word-problems. Now J.A. Lindon has arrived at the first complete solution to one of these problems, which we present at the end of this article. At the same time, Donald A. Drury, who provides (below) suggestions for solving some lower order trimino problems, has written to point out, concerning all these polyomino word-problems: "To make the reflection a new problem, you must rule out using the same words in any diagram as were used in its reflected opposite. Otherwise, by simply using the same words in reverse …
Kickshaws, David L. Silverman
Kickshaws, David L. Silverman
Word Ways
Readers are encouraged to send their own favorite linguistic kickshaws to the "Kickshaws" Editor.
Instructions To Contributors
Word Ways
Instructions to those wishing to contribute to the publication.
A Dictionary Of Common English Trigrams, A. Ross Eckler, Faith W. Eckler
A Dictionary Of Common English Trigrams, A. Ross Eckler, Faith W. Eckler
Word Ways
This article contains an alphabetical listing of approximately 6,530 trigrams (sets of three consecutive letters) occurring in English words - about 37 percent of the 17,576 theoretically possible trigram arrangements. For each trigram listed, one or more of the commonest English words containing that trigram are included.
Homographs And Pseudo-Homographs, Donald A. Drury
Homographs And Pseudo-Homographs, Donald A. Drury
Word Ways
Homographs, not to be confused with homonyms, are words which happen to be spelled identically but which have totally different meanings and etymologies. In addition to spelling, most homographic words share the same pronunciation. And so great is the spread of meanings - through association, figurative uses, and other influences - that many other words in English could be labeled pseudo-homographs: words with such widely disparate meanings that one would suppose them to come from entirely different sources, as the authentic homographs do.
Reas'ning But To Err, Temple G. Porter
Reas'ning But To Err, Temple G. Porter
Word Ways
Americans are great hobbyists. For the unimaginative there are supermarket style hobby shops where they can get pretanned leather, premolded plaster, preselected and prepolished stones for jewelry-making, ad infinitum. Then there are shops for collectors of different kinds, such as philatelists and numismatists. But there are some hobbies for which there are no corner shops, and upon which no financial empires are likely to be built. I know a man who collects railroad locomotives, another who presses the leaves of Chinese trees (which are hard to come by these days), and yet another who collects spider webs and mounts …
Spiraling Alphabets, Ben Rogers
Spiraling Alphabets, Ben Rogers
Word Ways
The words HUTS, RUTS, ARMY, and DENE (British: "valley") have in common a property not too hard to discover. They are all transposable (HUTS = SHUT and THUS, RUTS = RUST, ARMY = MARY, and DENE = NEED). Suppose we replace ARMY with NAVY, so that our set of four words is now HUTS, RUTS, NAVY, and DENE. What more unusual, more difficult to discover, property do they now have in common?
The Vocabularyclept Poem, No. 1, J. A. Lindon
The Vocabularyclept Poem, No. 1, J. A. Lindon
Word Ways
Mr. Lindon has solved the VC poem presented in the previous issue - and he has done this under further handicaps, the cause of which was my carelessness in presenting the problem to him. How he finally arrived at a technically exact solution under these conditions is a story in itself. The following passages from his letter make fascinating reading.
Word Association Crossword Puzzle, Temple G. Porter
Word Association Crossword Puzzle, Temple G. Porter
Word Ways
The solution to this puzzle rests not in your ability to divine synonyms, but in your ability to respond spontaneously and accurately with words that you associate with the clues. Although this is the first puzzle of the crossword type in the "association" genre we know of, the genre itself is replete with practitioners.
Word-Pairs Differing In A Single Letter, A. Ross Eckler
Word-Pairs Differing In A Single Letter, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
According to a recent issue of WORD WAYS, one of the most difficult feats in English verbal acrostics is to take a word spelled with a "U" and to change that "U" to a "V," producing an equally legitimate word. The only common word-pair having this property is VALUE-VALVE: Marty Fingeshut suggests the rarer pairs LEU-LEV, MOUE-MOVE, TAU-TAV and ROUE-ROVE.
People-Ized Bird Words, Doris Klindt Gundersen
People-Ized Bird Words, Doris Klindt Gundersen
Word Ways
Translating bird songs and sounds into human terms is an ancient pastime.
Bird words, as said or sung, should soar and glide, or trill musically, or otherwise serve as interpretive sound. Birds which say their own names, such as the chickadee, the killdee (r) and the bobwhite quail, are excluded, since they have become a part of the standard vocabulary.
Science And Magic At The Supermartorama, Temple G. Porter
Science And Magic At The Supermartorama, Temple G. Porter
Word Ways
What started out to be a quickie trip to the market for my wife the other day turned out to be a full day's opus, full of agonized choice-making. The shopping list demanded: "cough drops, cough syrup, aspirin, mouthwash, cleanser, hair spray, hair tonic, deodorant, shampoo, shaving soap, toothpaste, detergent, all-purpose cleaner, dish-washing liquid, bath soap, spray starch, after-shave lotion, margarine, fabric softener, car wax, and cigarettes." It sounded simple enough, but little did I realize what lay ahead of me.
A Word Game With License Plates, Jean C. Sabine
A Word Game With License Plates, Jean C. Sabine
Word Ways
This game is for license plates having a 3-letter prefix, as ABC-123.
The object is to make a word by adding letters before, between, and after the given letters, which must be kept in their original order. The scoring is as follows:
Any word - 1 point
A word formed by adding only vowels or only consonants - points equal to the square of the number of letters added
No word can be made - subtract 1 point from total.
Acrostic Poems In Bloom, Walter Shedlofsky
Acrostic Poems In Bloom, Walter Shedlofsky
Word Ways
Mr. Shedlofsky's poems grow ever more intricate. For of them are presented here, the first of which is an acrostic on its title, is shuttle-rhymed throughout, and is also a riddle (the solution to which will be given on page 126).
A Still Unsolved Problem, J. A. Lindon
A Still Unsolved Problem, J. A. Lindon
Word Ways
From a series consisting of an endless repetition of the ten digits in order, thus,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 . . . ,
take consecutive elements starting from 1, alternate elements starting from 2, every third element starting from 3, and so on.
A Near Solution To Mercer's Pentomino Poser, A. Ross Eckler
A Near Solution To Mercer's Pentomino Poser, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Leigh Mercer wrote, November 6, 1968: "A 6 by 10 rectangle can be built from the twelve pentominoes (the twelve ways five squares can be put together) in 2,339 different ways. I have drawings of these, and made a card-index of 2,339 cards from the drawings, discovering some interesting things no one else knew. They wouldn't do for WORD WAYS, I fear ..."
Find The Phyla, Temple G. Porter
Find The Phyla, Temple G. Porter
Word Ways
Our 15- by 15-letter letter square contains the names of all 21 phyla of the animal kingdom. Follow the clues and enter your solutions in the appropriate blanks.
Onomancy, Xavier Balilinkinoff
Onomancy, Xavier Balilinkinoff
Word Ways
When I was but thirteen or so, my seventh grade teacher, Milicent Whippoorwill, first acquainted me with the old spelling rule:
I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounding as A,
As in "neighbor" and "weigh."
Miss Whippoorwill also used to encourage us to anagram words, in order that we might become more familiar with their spelling.
Doctor Jones And The Lawless Lords Of Logomycin, J. A. Lindon
Doctor Jones And The Lawless Lords Of Logomycin, J. A. Lindon
Word Ways
Unable to draw his real foes into the open, Doctor Jones crosses swords directly with a Sinister Logological Entity which threatens the financial health of his entire Medical Empire.
Kickshaws, David L. Silverman
Kickshaws, David L. Silverman
Word Ways
Readers are encouraged to send their own favorite linguistic kickshaws to the "Kickshaws" Editor.
Instructions To Contributors
Word Ways
Instructions to those wishing to contribute to the publication.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.