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Ma Is A Nun, As I Am, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Provide a feast in honor of Pharaoh's home schooling, Rodney

Italian composer and wife behave immorally at a mountain pass

Would you like some saffron-seasoned rice in a meat sauce?

Diana's take on former Notre Dame coach: everyone's out to get him

Albert was bothered when his potato didn't arrive on time.

The Polyglot Ten-Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Hunting the Ten Square" in the May 2004 Word Ways, Rex Gooch mentions that Graham Toal recently succeeded in constructing by computer ten-squares based on 592,361 words drawn from various European languages. For the record, here are the two squares that he referred to.

Alphanumerically Truthful Equations

Word Ways

Susan Thorpe's pioneering excursion into alphanumeric arithmetic (WW '04-78) inspired me to look at the flip side of the coin and explore the alphanumerics of verbal equations. This involves adding up the numerical values of their letters using A=1 thru Z=26.* I began with the anagram ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE reported by Melvin O. Wellman in the April '48 issue of The Enigma, journal of the National Puzzlers League. This often regarded as the most perfect of all English anagrams. I reported several numero-logological coincidences regarding it in WW '02-308. I now report five more remarkable coincidences: …

Fabulous Creatures, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The collection has been compiled from over five hundred different sources, and contains a large number of weird and wonderful creatures, many not listed in standard references. For your enjoyment, here are some examples, one of each letter of the alphabet.

Counting With Your Fingers, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

Assuming that the thumb is your first finger, the index finger your second, and so on to the pinkie your fifth, here are the words in which each character typed on a qwerty typewriter keyboard by your nth finger appears precisely n times in the word.

The Campkin Poem, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

This poem, submitted by Henry Campkin to the March 8, 1873 British journal Notes and Queries, is somewhat nonsensical. It was written to please a group of youthful folk, and to show that the English tongue is as capable of being twisted into "uncouth shapes" as Latin. The terrible limp in the meter is unavoidable because one line of each couplet is largely palindromic.

Webster's Third Book Of Records, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The Guinness Book of Records has cataloged the world's extremes for nearly 50 years. First appearing in Britain in 1955 and the US in 1956, this book has listed the highest, the lowest, the hottest, the coldest, the longest, the smallest and so on, from a wide range of natural phenomena and human endeavors.

Denser Yet, And Yet Less Dense, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article concerns words of high and low density, ie a large sum with respect to the number of letters. A recent effort by Susan Thorpe (Lighter and Heavier, Word Ways, August 2003), also details previous work. She (deliberately, one supposes) omitted words, variously sanctioned by the OED and the Palindromicon, of length 5 or more, consisting solely of a repeated letter: I follow her in not using about 24 examples of repeated letters A, X, and Z.

The Eleven-Square - Take One, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

At the end of my article "Hunting the Ten-Square" (May 2004 Word Ways) I said that about one million 11-letter words might suffice to have a 50-50 chance of finding a square. I have since conducted some more investigations using both formula and programs, and conclude that more than two million words are needed to obtain a reasonable selection of squares.

English Loanwords In Japanese Tv Ads, Richard R.P. Gabbrielli

Word Ways

Historically speaking, linguistic borrowing is a common phenomenon in the evolution of a language. However, unlike countries where English was adopted as an institutional variety as a result of linguistic legacy, the English found in Japan - specifically in television advertising - is a particularly intriguing linguistic puzzle. Although most of the English one sees on products and garments is often incomprehensible, pointless, or simply rude, advertisers/copy writers do have the power to manipulate the English language and 'engineer' changes to satisfy their own utilitarian purposes.

Can Math Limericks Survive?, Will Nediger

Word Ways

This famous mathematical limerick by Leigh Mercer appeared in the February 1980 Word Ways.

The Creatures Of English Idioms, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Animals and birds, even lower forms of life, appear significantly in the traditional and often colorful idioms of English which teach the wisdom of the folk. Are you wise enough to provide the correct expression - and, if necessary, the name of the creature involved in each of these cases.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Transposing One Genre Into Another, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The letter pattern of some word genres is only a whisker away from the letter pattern of other word genres. My current objective is to change a word of one genre into a word of another genre by swapping the positions of just TWO of its letters. By this means, some tautonyms with the letter pattern 1212 (TOTO) make palindromes with the letter patterns 2112 and 1221 (OTTO and TOOT) simply by swapping the positions of the first 2 letters, or last 2 letters, respectively.

Numerical Palindromes: The Next Generation, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Several types of numerical palindromes have appeared in Word Ways (Susan Thorpe, Numerical Palindromes: Part 1 in Nov 1996 and Rex Gooch, Numerical Palindromes: Part 2 in Feb 1997). However, I believe the current exercise is the first to make two or more numerically-palindromic 'offspring' from the letters of a numerically-palindromic 'parent'. In other words, numerical palindromes beget numerical palindromes.

Shakespeare Anagrammed, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Shakespeare's Sonnet 117 can be anagrammed into the following poetic renditions of three famous plays.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Front Cover And Publication Information Volume 37 Issue 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Vowel Patterns In The Oed, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In most words, the arrangement of the five major vowels A, E, I, O, and U, irrespective of the consonants, does not follow any particular pattern. In some words, however, vowels do exhibit specific patterns.

Hunting The Ten-Square, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A ten-square consists of ten different 10-letter words written one under another, so that the first column reads the same as the first word, the second column the same as the second word, and so on.

A Recipe For Complete Dummies

Word Ways

But even a dummy is an inadequate lover if it only has limbs, neck and hair. So I've worked out a recipe for a complete dummy. Take the following ingredients, scale up or down to size, mix and voila! Many need to be scaled up or down to fit metrically. Forget rhyme. All are nouns, but some are forced. A few are abstract, but dummies have feelings.

State Name Overlaps, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In previous issues of Word Ways, attention has been drawn to US towns with names reflecting their position on the border between two states. Ed Wolpow's article "Names on the Border" in May 1984 provides a definitive list, including examples such as Florala (border of Florida Alabama) and Calneva (border of California and Nevada).

States And Capitals In Combination, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the November 2001 Word Ways I examined the transposability of the name of the capitals of the 50 US states. In the February and May 2002 issues, I extended the study to the longest transdeletion and the shortest transaddition of each capital name. For instance, for MONTGOMERY, the longest transdeletion was MOTORMEN, a deletion of two letters, and the shortest transaddition was MYRINGOTOME, an addition of one letter. To extend this research, I now combine the names of the capitals and the corresponding states, seeking the longest transdeletion. For example, the longest transdeletion for AUSTIN TEXAS appears to be …

State Weights, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Using the tried and tested process, let A=1, B=2, and so on, up to Z=26. Take each of the fifty US state names in turn and calculate the total value of the state name's constituent letters. These sums have been referred to as the weights of the corresponding words or names. The weights for the fifty state names, in increasing numerical order, are given in the first column in the table below. Now divide each of the weights by the number of letters in the corresponding state name. This gives an average weight per letter. Short these averages into increasing …

Buried States, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Recently, I noted that the state name Oregon is buried in the word 'foregone'; could I find other examples? I decided to concentrate on state names with six letters or fewer (Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah), ignoring words that were obviously derived from the state names concerned (such as Hawaiitic, meaning Hawaiian-like, and Oregonite, a mineral found in Oregon). Eventually I found examples from all but Hawaii.

Tautonyms And Tens, Arthur F. Holt

Word Ways

In 1921 Tunste {pseudonym of Paul Bryan, a National Puzzlers' League member} revealed to Puzzledom the famous formula for constructing a 10-square out of five different reduplication words - a clever idea, the practicality of which has since been fully demonstrated.

State Letter Banks: The Long And Short Of It, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Take each of the 50 US state names in turn. For each state name, reduce the name to the list of different letters occurring in the state name, ignoring repeated occurrences of letters (for example, Alabama to ABLM). For each such sequence, what is the longest and the shortest word that can be made from all the different letters, allowing repeated use of any letter? (In the National Puzzlers' League, collections of such words, not merely the longest and shortest possible, are known as a Letter Bank.)

Planet Packing In Two Dimensions, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

"Planet Packing" in the May 2001 Word Ways demonstrated that it is possible to use the 26-letter string MNVESARCPJLUPITHOURYANUSER to spell out each of the nine planet names in order. (Many other 26-letter strings are possible, but no 25-letter one has been found.) This article shows how to pack the planets in two dimensions. The loosest pack is, of course, the standard crossword. In the November 1998 Kickshaws, Jim Puder packed the planets (plus SUN, MOON , and UNIVERSE) into a 9x12 rectangle. The planets alone can be contained in a 10x10 square, given below at the left, but one …

State And Presidential Square Sets, Jim Puder

Word Ways

With the 2004 election looming, perhaps it is time to take belated noticed of the fact that we presently live in a rare presidential square-set era. By a "square set," I mean a set of things, the letters of whose names add up to some square number. Such sets are chiefly interesting for the fact that they evenly fill square grids; when they do so in such a way that all of their words remain intact and unbent, they are said to "pack" their grids. There are two broad categories of square sets, number-name square sets and non-numerical square sets. …