Digital Commons Network^™

Eva: Palindromic Chaos In A Cave, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

The dangers attendant on speleology have perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized. In one particularly gruesome incident, a spelunker dived into a cave pool, passed unawares through a subterranean passage, and emerged from the pool into an enclosed grotto. Being unable to find his way back with the pool disguising his whereabouts from the search party, he starved to death in the darkness.

Foldedness Factor In Letter Arrays, James Puder

Word Ways

An idle diversion with pencil and graph paper involves writing some ordered sequence of letters in the cells of a grid and searching the horizontal, vertical and diagonal rows of the resulting array for accidentally-formed new words. Since there is usually a multiplicity of possible ways to inscribe a given letter string into a grid, the question arises as to whether some inscription patterns are likely to be more productive of new words than others. Logic suggests that the answer is yes. Because any new words in the array must form along straight lines, and because no answer is yes. …

Dude, Not One Dud!, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Xxxx, X xxxx xxx I tell actor Lancaster that I'm ready for a massage

Xxxxxx xx Xxxxx'x xxxxx xxx? I muse: has George Bush's chief of staff been discharged?

C Can Cause Cancer, William Gillespie

Word Ways

epidemiological scientific research confirms

curious doctors' uncertain suspicions

medical researchers announce conclusions:

c can cause cancer

Bananagrams 17, 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 anagrams, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagram. All of the bananagrams in this article have been borrowed form the late Bill Webster's One Wordy Guy.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Qing Pangrams, Alan G. Wagner

Word Ways

The word Qing, the name of the last Chinese dynasty (1644-1912), is frequently employed as an adjective, as in Qing porcelain. Used in a pangram, Qing has the obvious advantage of taking care of the Q while freeing up the U to be used elsewhere, resulting in 26-letter pangrams which make much better sense and use more familiar words than the ones I have seen. However, Qing does not appear as an entry in Merriam-Webster's Tenth New Collegiate (10C), Merriam-Webster's Third New International (NI3), or the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (OED). 10C does have an entry for Ching (or …

Gull-Day-Looks Enter Tree Bars, William E. Brandt

Word Ways

Wants pond term dare worsted ladle gull wit surge putty you low coils date peephole culled hire Gull-day-looks. Gully-day-looks lipped wit hire mutter inner ladle coat hedge knee rah eye bag four rest. Wine over Gull-day-looks axed oaf sheik cud gopher awoke enter bag four rest, hire mutter wood hallways sign, "Sir teen lie knot! Day bag four rest aster ding jar us, eats fouled with wee kid bars slack tweet ladle gulls."

No Gnus Is Good Gnus, Jim Puder

Word Ways

A gnu is a large, stocky antelope whose seeming ambition is to be a cow. Distinctive for its bizarre rocking-horse running motion, this oddly-formed even-toed ungulate has been described as being made up of parts left over from other animals, an assessment that is probably unfair to other animals. But although their doll appearance may endear gnus (or"gnu"; either pluralization is correct) to the public at large, few palindromists are ever charmed to find a gnu noshing nonchalantly in their word gardens; indeed, their more usual reaction to such a discovery is to, well, have a gnu.

A Modified Ten-Square, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

More than ten years have passed since "In Search of the Ten-Square" appeared in the November 1990 Word Ways. The ASTRALISED square presented in the article was the culmination of almost twenty years of work on large squares. The main weakness of the ASTRALISED square is the term ROLY NADERS, because there is no published record of Roly Nader anywhere, and besides, there seems to be just one Roland Nader, who is only occasionally called Roly.

A New Approach To The Ten-Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Ever since Chris Long's mathematical model in the February 1993 Word Ways showing that it takes a list of at least 250,000 ten-letter words to have a reasonable chance of forming a ten-square, logologists have despaired of forming one from dictionary-sanctioned words. Only by extending the definition of an acceptable "word" does a ten-square seem possible. One way to accomplish this is to allow words from any language (a polyglot square); another is to allow proper or personal names. This article suggests how the latter approach might be realized by reducing the construction of a ten-square to relatively simple independent …

Symmetrical Letter Patterns, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

We take for granted the symmetrical letter patterns in palindromes - such as LEVEL and KAY AK. These involve all the letters in the world. But what about symmetrical letter patterns which occur in non-palindromic words, such as that of the letter N in ENCHANTMENT? In Making the Alphabet Dance, Ross Eckler gave the name 'cadence' to a set of identical letters spaced at equal intervals in a word - as in SYNGENESIOTRANSPLANTATION. Her, I add two constraints: the letters must be symmetrical within the word, as well as in relation to each other.

A Scrabble-Tile Poem, Michael Keith

Word Ways

Each tercet (three lines of iambic pentameter with ABA rhyme-scheme) in the poem below is formed from the set of 100 Scrabble tiles.

Annihilating An Anacyclic, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

Like everything else (except space-time, sentience, and energy), letter-unit palindromes more than one word long are susceptible of being broken down into their component elements. This is accomplished in accordance with an invariable rule. Let us take as our analysandum A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA.

Mad Dashes, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

The other day I came across one of those loopy hyphenations that one occasionally finds in newspapers and magazines.

"Is That A Pun In Your Pocket, Or...?", Don Hauptman

Word Ways

To publicize my two wordplay books, which were published in the early 1960s, I prepared a talk that I delivered in such exotic places as Paris and Jersey City. (Really!)

The State Capitals Revisited, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In my November 2001 Word Ways article, "Transposing the State Capitals", I explored the transposability of the names of the 50 state capitals. In that article, I offered transposals for 20 of the names of the state capitals, leaving readers to explore the remaining 30.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Word Repetition In Danish: "Jeg Mener 'Saeg' Ikke 'Skaeg'" (I Mean 'Funny' Not 'Beard'), Joshua Nash

Word Ways

A notable feature of language is the use of the same word to communicate different meanings. The first example that comes to mind in English is still. I am aware of at least three meanings (1) when something is motionless or at rest, (2) apparatus used to distill alcohol, and (3) the adverb still which means 'as yet' or 'up to this time' (for example, 'are you still there?').

Junk Palindrome Email, David B. Woodside

Word Ways

Email is pervasive and mostly worthless. People do try to spruce up their emails, which is part of the reason they're mostly worthless. I've done my part by incorporating wordplay into the emails I originate. In my email template I've placed a new field under the Subject field, labeled Palindrome-of-the-Week. Every Monday morning over coffee, I update the form with a new, original palindrome, and transfer the old palindrome to page two where it tops the list of the past two years' worth of Palindromes of the Week. Here is a sample of my output.

The Symbols Of The Chemical Elements, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The names of the chemical elements have received a certain amount of attention in Word Ways over the years. The very first issue of Word Ways in February 1968 presented a quiz on 20 transposed element names. Later article have offered more extensive transpositions, transadditions, old names for some of the elements, elements in US placenames, and words composed solely of the element symbols, such as CoAgULaTe.

Permed Ends, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The readers of Word Ways will be familiar with words whose first few letters are repeated, in the same order, at the end of the word. John Ferguson of Maryland called these Heads 'n Trails (Feb 1970, p 48). Example of the genre include ICELANDIC, TORMENTOR, OUTSHOUTS, and UNDERGROUNDER. By way of contrast, the first few letters might be repeated at the end of the word in reverse order, as in DETONATED and SELAGINELLALES (dfpf). The current investigation explores a third way in which the letters at the beginning of a word are repeated at the end of the word, …

Vowel Cascades, Vowel Movements And Di-Odes

Word Ways

In the February 1998 Word Ways, Richard Lederer used the term "vowel movements" to describe those rather musical sets of five words identical but for one letter which runs the gamut of the vowels. These were first introduced to Word Ways by Dmitri Borgmann in August 1968, who cited last lest list lost lust and asked readers to find a word set allowing the letter Y to be included as well. This was accomplished by Darryl Francis in August 1975 with math meth mith moth muth myth, to which several readers added other examples such as Dane dene dine done …

Nurses Run, John E. Connett

Word Ways

Abstract unavailable.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Complementary Letters And Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In "Complementary Letters" in the November 2001 Word Ways, Anil defines complementary letters as those whose ordinal places in the alphabet add to 27, e.g., A and Z, or L and O. He asks for words and phrases composed solely of such pairs, giving EVOLVE as an example, and asking whether LOVERISH is a word (I cannot find it). Such words must be even length, say 2n, and have n pairs of letters. My findings are presented below. As can be seen, such words are scarce. An asterisk denotes words that have this property in extremis: every one of the …

Bananagrams 16, 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. All of the bananagrams in this article are related to birds, and have been borrowed from Bill Webster's book One Wordy Guy.

Ma, Is A Fool As Aloof As I Am?, Bruce Young

Word Ways

A variant of the well-known Ma is a nun, as I am and Ma is a selfless as I am, this palindrome appears to be new.

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.