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Cruel Unending Drama, Mike Keith Feb 2005

Cruel Unending Drama, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The poem below was composed under a double constraint, which was to encode the first 85 decimal digits of two well-known irrational numbers. Can the reader discover what those numbers are, and how they are encoded?

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Sequential Words, Susan Thorpe Feb 2005

Sequential Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Readers of Word Ways are familiar with palindromes, tautonyms, Miami Words (WW200014) and Ladders Words (WW2002279). In Sequential Words, sequences of these genres, rather than entire words, are considered. The idea is to look for words made of 2 or more such sequences. The sequences which make the word may both/all be of the same genre: SUSANNA, with the letter pattern 121 3443, consists of 2 palindromic sequences - a palindromic sequence followed by a Miami Sequence.

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The 11 Heterograms Of Farthalomew Splib, Fender Tucker Feb 2005

The 11 Heterograms Of Farthalomew Splib, Fender Tucker

Word Ways

Beads of sweat sprang out on the brow of radio personality Wally Fletch as he sat down in the front of the micophone. He knew that it he didn't read his uncle's story flawlessly, he'd lose his $100,000 inheritance and with it the hand of the only woman he'd ever loved, Miss Avigail Beutelle. What a contretemps!

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The Adventures Of Word Man, Don Hauptman Feb 2005

The Adventures Of Word Man, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Literacy is in a parlous state. Whether the causes lie in our educational system, the influences of the mass media, the jargon and informality of e-mail, or some other factors, I will leave to others to determine.

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Lewis Carroll And Douglas Adams, Will Nediger Feb 2005

Lewis Carroll And Douglas Adams, Will Nediger

Word Ways

On July 4 1826 both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, precisely 50 years after signing the Declaration of Independence. The only surviving signer was Charles Carroll. On July 4 1862 Lewis Carroll first told the tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Alice Liddell.

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Plane Earth Planet Packings, Jim Puder Feb 2005

Plane Earth Planet Packings, Jim Puder

Word Ways

The Plane Earth Study and Teaching Society wishes to thank word Ways' editor for generously granting us this opportunity to respond to his gravely misleading article in the May 2004 Word Ways entitled "Planet Packing in Two Dimensions." But before addressing that issue, we would like to acquaint the reader with our Society's basic tenets.

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More Balanced Word Pairs, Rex Gooch Feb 2005

More Balanced Word Pairs, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Darryl Francis presented a neat idea in "Balanced Word Pairs" in the November 2004 Word Ways. I do, however, prefer a name like "complementary word pairs" because the corresponding letters in each word are the 27s-complement of each other. i do not see how the word "balanced" applies, as it does with balanced words. Darryl found just one example of length 6; I found another 150 of this length (mostly by using place names). I also found nine of length 7 (ignoring words consisting of strings of up to 23 As). The following selection of length 6 includes cases where …

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Colloquy Feb 2005

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Diagonal-Letter Words, Eric Iverson Feb 2005

Diagonal-Letter Words, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

The letters AKMNVWXYZ are the only ones containing diagonal lines. Here are some of the longer words with runs of these letters (not including variants using -s, -ness, -ed, -ing, -ly, etc.).

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London Underground (Tube) Names, Darryl Francis Feb 2005

London Underground (Tube) Names, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

My name has appeared over articles in Word Ways since its initial appearance in the late 1960s. Between then and now my name has appeared over eight different addresses, six of them in or near the outskirts of London. After I had finally settled in the country of Cumbria in early 2004, I decided to tackle a project that had been a vague idea for a number of years, one that would link in with my longtime London residency.

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A Quantitative Approach To Interestingness, A. Ross Eckler Feb 2005

A Quantitative Approach To Interestingness, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Good Grief!" in the November 1973 Word Ways, Merlin X. Houdini IV (a pseudonym of Dmitri Borgmann) stated his Fundamental Axiom of Logology: "All words and all names tantalize with their interest, if you but perceive them correctly". He illustrated this with an analysis of the names of the 15 largest US cities. He repeated this claim under his own name in "The Keystone of Logology" in February 1977, illustrating it with twenty words from the 1974 Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary.

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Word Groups, Simon Norton Feb 2005

Word Groups, Simon Norton

Word Ways

When I read Daniel Austin's article "Can All Words Be Expressed as Sumagrams?" in the May 2004 Word Ways, I thought to myself that his results could have been obtained without needing the ability to rearrange the letters of a word. Let me discuss this in terms of the mathematical underpinning of his article.

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Word Weaves, Steven Kahan Feb 2005

Word Weaves, Steven Kahan

Word Ways

When the letters in the odd positions of a word appear alphabetized, we say that the word is odd-ascending; when these letters appear reverse alphabetized, we call the word odd-descending. Similarly, we refer to works as even-ascending or even-descending when the letters that occupy their even positions are alphabetized or reverse alphabetized, respectively.

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Constrained Pyramids, Susan Thorpe Feb 2005

Constrained Pyramids, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Word pyramids, in which a letter is added at each step and the letters rearranged, will be familiar to the readers of Word Ways. The aim has been the construct a pyramid with as long a base word as possible, ideally with all words from a single dictionary.

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The Prime Ministers, More Or Less, Jim Puder Feb 2005

The Prime Ministers, More Or Less, Jim Puder

Word Ways

The names of the American presidents have been transposed in various ways in at least three Word Ways articles, but to my knowledge no such attention has heretofore been accorded the names of their British counterparts, the prime ministers. To address this oversight, offered below is a table of metatransposals (i.e., transdeletions and transadditions) of British prime ministerial surnames similar to the one of the surnames of U.S. presidents offered in my August 1998 article, "The Presidents, More or Less."

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Vicinal And Nonvicinal Heterograms, Eric Iverson Feb 2005

Vicinal And Nonvicinal Heterograms, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

A vicinal, as defined in Dave Morice's The Dictionary of Wordplay, is a word in which each letter has an alphabetic neighbor; that is, each letter in the word occupies a position in the alphabet next to another letter that appears in the word. (The term was created by Eugene Ulrich in the August 1983 Kickshaws.) Let us write the alphabet in a circle, regarding A and Z as alphabetic neighbors as well. Here is a collection of heterograms words with no repeated letters that are vicinals.

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Going Home, Leonard R. N. Ashley Feb 2005

Going Home, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

It is not surprising to Americans, the object of whose national game is "to get home" (according to comedian Gorge Carlin), that the word home enters much into the language. Can you identify how the word appears in our expression?

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Bananagrams 22, Edmund Conti Feb 2005

Bananagrams 22, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams - anagrams to drive you bananas - consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve it.

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Kickshaws, Dave Morice Feb 2005

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Poisonwood Palindromes, Jeff Grant Feb 2005

Poisonwood Palindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Barbara Kingsolver's best-selling novel The Poison Bible was published in 1998. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Congo in 1959. One of his twin daughters, Adah, was born with hemiplegia (paralysis on one side) and is believed to be slightly brain-damaged.

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Magic Word Squares: A Challenge Feb 2005

Magic Word Squares: A Challenge

Word Ways

Word Squares, as WW readers know, are square stacks of equal-length words that read the same across and down -- or a different set of words across and down in the case of the much rarer double word squares or blankless crosswords. Magic Squares on the other hand are square stacks of numbers where each row, column and diagonal adds up to the same sum.

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Alphanumerically Truthful Equations, Rex Gooch Feb 2005

Alphanumerically Truthful Equations, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In W2004-202, Anil re-introduced the equation 11 + 2 = 12 + 1. Not only is this obviously true in this numeric form, but when written ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE, the sum of the letter values on the left (taking A = 1 etc) equals the sum of the letter values on the right, viz 121. In this case, it is because the same letters are used on both sides.

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Don Quixote Pangrams, A. Ross Eckler Feb 2005

Don Quixote Pangrams, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

When listeners to Will Shortz's "Weekend Edition Sunday" program on National Public Radio in September 2002 were asked to construct pangrams with the name of a famous person, they found Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, jointly containing three of the four rarest letters (all but J) irresistible. Here is a collection of their efforts.

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Back Cover Feb 2005

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Answers And Solutions Feb 2005

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Dealy Deli Specials, Doctor Duck Feb 2005

Dealy Deli Specials, Doctor Duck

Word Ways

Down here a "deli" is a small neighbourhood grocery cum sandwich bar and usually a bit of a general store. The shop window on the back cover illustrates ours. We've bribed the editor into letting us offer you yet more of our specials below. Send your orders c/o the editor. Remember our motto "NEVER FEAR, BUT IT HERE! WE DON'T DILLY DELI AROUND." (Please to blame my suppliers for the shocking number of atrocious puns among the bold. brand names.)

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The Concept Of “World Language”, V. G. Kostomarov Jan 2005

The Concept Of “World Language”, V. G. Kostomarov

Russian Language Journal

Although the United Nations has declared that its working languages—English, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, and, more recently, Japanese and Arabic— are “world languages,” there is no strictly linguistic basis for such a claim. Indeed, many linguists reject the term, and many of those who do accept it believe that it denotes—roughly—an artificial global language. Moreover, many find in it an unpleasant hint of the pseudoscientific idea that one language can be superior to another.

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Letter Banks Of The Capitals, Will Nediger Nov 2004

Letter Banks Of The Capitals, Will Nediger

Word Ways

Recently, Darryl Francis found words from the letter banks of the chemical elements and the states of the US. I decided to letter-bank (to coin a verb) the names of the nations of the world, but I found that, on average, their capitals had shorter names that their countries. I used a Scrabble-based (North American vocabulary only) program similar to LeXpert to letter-bank the national capitals.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 4 Nov 2004

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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Elementary Combinations, Darryl Francis Nov 2004

Elementary Combinations, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In school and college, we learnt that chemical elements combine with each other to form new substances, compounds, in very well-defined ways, obeying certain scientific rules. For example, we learned that two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen combine to form a molecule of water, and that one atom of sulfur combines with four atoms of oxygen to form a sulphate radical with electrical charge -2. In chemistry these rules of combination were explained in terms of valence and bonds, and in physics the rules were explained in terms of rings of electrons and the numbers of electrons …

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