Digital Commons Network^™

Pangram Competition, William Shortz

Word Ways

If typists ever want a replacement for the old chestnut "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", do I have some suggestions! Below are my favorite sentences submitted by National Public Radio "Weekend Edition Sunday" listeners in a creative pangram competition on September 22 and 29, 2002. Each sentence uses all 26 letters of the alphabet at least once (that's a pangram) and contains the name of a famous person (the extra requirement of the contest). Out of thousands of entries, I selected the following on the basis of brevity, meaning, naturalness of syntax, and (sometimes) their ability …

Quarter Ten-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A tautonym was originally the same word repeated for genus and species, though in Word Ways it is used of a single word consisting of two identical halves, such as Wallawalla, a North American Indian people (OED). I take it that it is not necessary for the two halves to have the same meaning, is for the semantic split to occur also in the middle. Suppose we start a 10-letter word square with a tautonym ABCDEABCDE. The second row must begin with B, say BFGHI (we will just use the first half for brevity), the third with CG, eg CGJKL, …

Ten-Square With Place Names, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Although the words in the following square only score 36 out of 50 on my crude scale of merit (because of proper names and spaces), the square as a whole deserves better, as all names are places, and from the same source.

Sighted Rhymes, Sank Same, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Sight rhymes are rhymes that look like rhymes. They have the same ending letters that you would find in rhyming words but, alas, the combinations of letters are pronounced differently. Such is the nature of the English language.

Roots And Branches: A Simplified Diagram, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

As he clearly implies, the full picture of the roots and branches of a word can be an "intertwining tangle". A particular word may be reached via several different transdeletions (or transadditions), and the resulting diagram can be confusing, with many lines crossing each other, and there being no clear indication of the structure.

Bb And The Rebusgram

Word Ways

BB is a rebus. In fact it's a rebus of rebus: "Re-B us". In this article I mainly explore the one-letter rebus, its opposite the "antirebus" and their use in higher dimensional constructions I call "rebusgrams". I close with a quiz-full of multiple-letter rebus puzzles.

Verse, Cursed: Double Dactylic Sacrilege, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

As all card-carrying recreational linguists know, the double dactyl is a serious light verse form comprising two quatrains, with each line -- except the final, rhyming lines of the quatrains -- consisting of two dactylic feet, and in which the first line must be a nonsense reduplication; the second line a proper name; and the penultimate or antepenultimate line one double dactylic word. For complete rules, origins, scholarship and numerous cerebral examples

Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Part 2), Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Part 1 of the article listed V-C patterns in 7- and 8-letter words. Part 2 repeats the exercise for 9-letter words and then analyses the 7-, 8-, and 9-letter V-C patterns.

More Palindromes, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The following palindromes are additional to those listed in Palindromicon II. Although I have removed some candidates, those below are accompanied by sufficient information that the reader can accept or reject each as desired. My own criteria for acceptance differ from those of the Palindromicon, so this list is not precisely an addition to that work. However, I, like it, have omitted almost all initialism (CFC), also musical terms (fff), Roman numerals (MCM), chess notation (PxP), and international vehicle registrations (GBG), except for one or two. Abbreviations like Mdm, and morpheme-medial clusters like rtr are also omitted. The list is …

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Lyrical Palindromes, Mark J. Russell

Word Ways

Last lash, sugar of suede

Taste yet again

A manic in a pot of rust.

Double Doubles, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

This article searches for words in which 2 pairs of double letters occur adjacently. Previous items in Word Ways have looked for words with 2 pairs of doubled letters but, almost exclusively, words in which the 2 pairs occur anywhere in relation to each other. However, scattered in these lists are examples in which the 2 pairs occur together. The History section below extracts these examples. The words are listed in alphabetical order of the doubled letters. Unreferenced words in the History section can be found in Webster's Second Edition.

Mothers And Their Vowels, Thomas L. Bernard

Word Ways

Born into the Scottish nobility in the first year of the twentieth century, Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon became the Queen Consort on the accession of her husband Prince Albert to the throne (as King George VI) in 1936. When she became a window in 1952 and her daughter became Queen Elizabeth II, she was formally known as the Queen Mother but more informally and affectionately by the general public as the "Queen Mum". Her children Elizabeth and Margaret, though grown, continued to call her "Mummy".

Bananagrams 20, 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 the anagram.

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.

A Logological Game Of Bridge, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In a game of contract bridge, the four players are assigned the names North, East, South, and West, corresponding to their seats around a bridge table. Among the 52 playing cards, from the Spade Ace to the Club Two, which 13 are most appropriate for North to hold? Which 13 for East? For South? For West? The Spade Ace shares no letters with North, three letters with East (eas), and one letter with South (s), and two letters with West (es). So, it is logologically appropriate to assign the Spade Ace to East.

(W)Holesome Fun, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Word squares continue to constitute one of the grand research topics of recreational linguistics. The search for a universally acceptable 10-square is still one of the Holy Grails of word play. Like any substantial research topic, the idea of "word squares" suggests a further plethora of interesting related topics by modifying and relaxing its definition.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

The Heptcat Perspicuous Palindrome Producer, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Over the years, various ideas for the mechanical generation of palindromic sentences have been published in Word Ways. Of these, the simplest in concept may have been Dave Morice's Palindromic Slide Rule (August, 1995). This device separates palindromic passages into paired segments comprised of single reversal words; by shifting the positions of columns of such words with respect to one another in slide rule fashion, users can generate up to 10,000 different palindromic passages.

An Insomniac's Research Report, Frederick Crane

Word Ways

Among the many afflictions of my old age is insomnia. I do not extend periods abed when I'm conscious of being asleep, but I am more often aware of being awake.

Outtakes, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Each group of letters below is a familiar word, phrase, name or title from which any sequence of consecutive letters of the alphabet (in order) inside it has been removed. The remaining letters are then run together. For example, NNION would represent the phrase STUDENT UNION (missing the STU, DE, and TU). The total number of letters in the original formulation appears in parentheses. How many can you reconstruct?

Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Part 1), Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Word Ways 77221), Philip Cohen presented a list of words based on 125 of the possible 128 (2^7) 7-letter vowel-consonant (V-C) patterns. Somewhat belatedly, this has inspired me to undertake similar exercises for 8-letter words and 9-letter words. As Cohen's article appeared more than 25 years ago, before most of us were acquainted with Word Ways, I have also taken the liberty of repeating his 7-letter exercise, using different words wherever appropriate. Part 1 considers 7- and 8-letter words; Part 2 considers 9-letter words, and also analyses the patterns with regard to the number of words they …

Moose Laurels, Part 2: Story Spoonerisms, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

In our previous episode (Word Ways, August 2002), we examined a new crop of transposition puns accompanied by one-line definitions. Now let us turn to a related genre: the joke that contains a more detailed setup and a spoonerized punchline.

The Alphabet Cube And Beyond, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Two-letter words can be plotted as points on a two-dimensional plane. The first letter of a two-letter word is plotted against the x-axis, and the second letter is plotted against the y-axis. Along the x-axis, x=1 is equivalent to the letter A, x=2 is equivalent to the letter B, and so on, with x=26 being equivalent to the letter Z. Similarly, plot the second letter of a word on the y-axis, with y=1 equivalent to A, y=2 equivalent to B, etc. So, for example, take the two-letter word HE. The H corresponds to x=8 and the E corresponds to y=5. …

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

New Record Pangrammatic Windows, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Most readers of Word Ways are familiar with the "accidental pangram" problem, which is to find a short 'window' (block of contiguous text) in published text that, but accident rather than deliberation, contains each letter of the alphabet at least once. The record for the shortest known accidental pangram in English has stood for 95 years, as it was reported in print by A. Cyril Pearson in The Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, published in 1907. It is from The Beth Book, a popular 1897 novel by Sarah Grand (republished as recently as 1980 by The Dial Press).

The Tebahpla, David Morice

Word Ways

Awake! As actors afterward amass,

An artful agent almost acts an ass

And asks aloud, "Are acting arts about

An artist's act? An actor's art?" Alas!

Some Superior Ten-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The following squares are, in my view, the approximate equal, or superior of, the square published as My First Ten-Square (Word Ways August 2002). I invite readers to form their own views as to the relative merits of the three squares below and the August one. I give my own views inverted at the end of the article.

Lattice Play, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

At first glance, lattices seem to offer few attractions as a wordplay form. They are far more abundant than word squares and easier to construct. Although long neglected, lattices yield a previously unknown but elegant pangrammatic set, one involving only 33 total letters and words from a single dictionary.