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Alphabetic Insertions In Five-Letter Palindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In "A Palindromic Alphabetic Insertion" (WW, Nov. 1982), we displayed a set of 3-letter palindromes of the form A-A, covering every combination from AAA, chief signet-bearer in the land of Kens, under the Egyptian king Aspalut, through to AZA, a male given name of Hebrew origin meaning "the noble."

"Another Palindromic Insertion" (WW, Aug 1992) explored the letter set A--A, giving examples for all but three of the double-letter alphabetic insertions, from AAAA, a Tahitian interjection of laughter or ridicule, to AZZA, a wadi in Iran. Examples have now been found for the missing combinations.

Looking For The Longest Insider Word, Jim Puder

Word Ways

The notion that physical objects may sometimes best be hidden by being left in plain sight, but camouflaged or disguised in some way, was famously propounded by Edgar Allan Poe in his celebrated short story, "The Purloined Letter." A wordplay incarnation of this idea is found in the fabrication of "insider" sentences, sentences akin to charade sentences in which occult non-sentence words are spelled out in consecutive letters of the sentence, albeit usually broken up into two or more parts by the sentence's word breaks and/or punctuation.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 48, Number 1

Word Ways

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

Knight-Graphable Words, Tristan Miller, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Imagine an arbitrarily large chessboard where some of the squares are labelled with distinct letters of the alphabet. A word is said to be knight-graphable (NG) if there exists some labeling such that a knight can spell out the word by starting on the square labelled with its first letter, then making a valid move to the square labelled with its second letter, and so on until the square labelled with the last letter is reached.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Medusa, Hailey Mohr

Word Ways

A poem.

"P" Nuts, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

In the matching quiz that follows, twenty clues for targeted words have been supplied in each of two columns. Those in Column B can be manufactured from their appropriate counterparts in Column A by inserting the "P" into their interiors.

Palindromising The Days And Months, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Near the beginning of Jim Puder's palindromic poem "The Devil's Dyad" in his article "Lycanthropus Palindromis" (WW, May 1998), the names Monday, Wednesday and Saturday are used in the second part of "Two Palindrome Recreations" (WW, Aug 2012), Jim cleverly works the months into individual palindromes.

After transposing the days and months (WW Aug 2014), here is my attempt at palindromizing them.

King's Moves In The Periodic Table, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Playing with the names and symbols of the chemical elements has been a continuing theme in Word Ways. The first issue of Word Ways (back in February 1968) carried an item, An Elemental Problem, which quizzed readers with transposals of the names of 20 elements. Over the years, other articles have explored further transposals, transadditions and transdeletions, and so on. My articles of February 2002 and May 2006 investigated the existence of words and names spelled out when the symbols for chemical elements were spelled out in one continuous stream of letters.

Poems - Part I, Jon Bannon

Word Ways

A collection of poems.

Dartboard Words, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The standard dartboard should be familiar to most readers, although most would be hard pressed to reel off the exact arrangement of the numbers 1 to 20.

Anagram Quiz 15, . Anil

Word Ways

A quiz.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors and back cover.

Functional Tautonyms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Numerical Tautonyms such as GULP (G+U=28 AND L+P also =28) have appeared in previous issues of Word Ways. Letters (in the case 2) from each half of the word are added (+) according to their alphabetical values. However, there are other ways of achieving numerical tautonyms.

Wolves In Sheep's Clothing, . Anil

Word Ways

Don't believe your eyes! There's a bunch of animals out there disguised as other animals, braving their niches. This map of 100 disguises or "hides" hides 50 hiders.

Beheading And Joining, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Two words which begin with the same letter, or group of letters, are beheaded i.e. the common letter/letter group is removed. The two remaining sets of letters are joined to form a word. I set a minimum of 5 letters for this word.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles and quizzes contained in this issue.

Calling On The Homophone, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Too-Fore-sics-ate! Homophones we appreciate!

Homophones are pairs (pears, pares), triads, or more capacious clusters of words that sound the same but are spelled differently and communicate different meanings.

The Year In Bloopers, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Once again, it was a banner year for blunders and boners, flubs and fluffs, gaffes and goofs, slips and solecisms. Most such lapses are simply depressing, because they confirm America's diminishing literacy levels. But some at least possess the redeeming value of amusement.

A Pangrammatic Variant Of Sudoku, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

A sudoku grid contains 81 squares. Any three subgrids contain 27 squares. To my knowledge, no one has exploited how close this number is to 26, the size of the English alphabet. In this article, I propose a simple way to link the full alphabet to the standard sudoku grid.

Yo, Get A Mate, Goy!, Richard Canty

Word Ways

The following is a chess fantasy which describes the progress of a game using palindromes. Here and there, narration explains the various episodes. The subtitles throughout the piece are themselves palindromes and prefigure the coming developments.

Pros And Cons - 1, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Some situations in life have distinct advantages, while others present clear disadvantages. The same can be said about the twenty words for which clues have been supplied in Column A below. Each word sought there can be prefaced with either PRO or CON to create a new one whose definition appears somewhere in Column B.

Ebola, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

As distressing as the disease and its spread is to all of us, ebola
is interesting to the wordplay-loving logologist from several viewpoints, Firstly, it has a number of transposals.

Longest Anagrams, . Anil

Word Ways

Using "anagrams" in the narrow sense of meaningful or COGNATE TRANSPOSALS, what are the longest single-word examples?

A Tribute To "Armand T. Ringer" 1914-2010, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

A Tribute To "The Mathemagician", Scot Morris

Word Ways

A tribute to Martin Gardner from the book ONMI Games, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. Used by permission of the author.

Look Close, Harold Jacobs

Word Ways

What is special about these words?

Segregated Lettershifts, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Friends, are you fascinated, as so many imaginative people are, by the possibilities inherent in lettershifting, but find that you're reluctant to actually perform this radical, word-altering operation?

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 47, Number 4

Word Ways

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