Digital Commons Network^™

Planet Packing, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Suppose that one has a list of words. What is the smallest string of letters needed to exhibit all of these words, each spelled out in order but not necessarily using adjacent letters in the string? For example, one, two, and three can be embedded in the eight-letter string thrwonee (or several others), but no seven-letter string is possible. It is easy to see that seven is the theoretical minimum, for six different letters appear once in any word, and one letter appears twice in a word. For longer lists, however, letter counts of individual words yield only a lower …

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Charade Cubes, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Charades are one of the oldest, simplest, and most amusing forms of wordplay. Charades are simply dissections of a word into two or more words, preferably unrelated to the original. Our greatest amusement derives from surprise at the buried images; for example, leg ally from legally, rap a city from rapacity, stag nation from stagnation, and either no table or not able from notable.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Stop Press! Newspaper Lanuage Lapses, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

My friend and fellow recreational linguist Richard Lederer is surely the master of amusing language gaffes and bloopers, having immortalized the form in his popular Anguished English series of books. But I trust that Dr. Lederer will forgive me for attempting to game him at his own beat.

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 2

Word Ways

"Anil" is the pen name of Dr. Charles Melton, a retired Oz (Australian) biologist who privately published in 1999 a 98-page booklet, up/dn, a dictionary and contradictionary of wordplay. This is part of a continuing series of excerpts from his book.

Four-Letter Super Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Four-letter words are famously well connected to each other. Fewer than one per cent of words connect to no other, whereas over 70 per cent in each of the four possible positions-on average, there are 23 neighbours for each word. For our present purpose, note that more than three-quarters are heterograms. This means that Connoisseur's Ladders (those with sequential replacement between heterograms, plus a relationship between the first and last words) become commonplace. On the other hand, the number of such ladders is restricted by the relatively small number (fewer than 20,000) of four-letter words available.

Five-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

For five-letter words, over 60 per cent of words are heterograms, fewer than 2 per cent are isolanos, over a quarter onalosis, and each word has almost 13 neighbours on average--over two per letter. On the other hand, there are not many more than half the number of words to choose from compared to six-letter words. Also it is not possible to have sequential replacement between reversals: from ABCDE to EDCBA would proceed via EBCDE, EDCDE, then EDCDE again, and an implicit conditions of all our ladders is that no word should be repeated, so we will not find reversals …

Prime Time, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

What is a PRIME WORD? There are at least three possible answers to this question.

Anglophone Friend Or Foe?, Thomas L. Bernard

Word Ways

I watched a World War II program about how the Germans recruited a group of soldiers who could speak English (or thought that they could) to infiltrate American lines and cause havoc. Even though dressed in U.S. uniforms, they soon ran into difficulties as a result of their English language knowledge and usage; for example, some of them were only familiar with British English. This situation transported me in my mind back to the Revolutionary war. I doubted that there was a great deal of language difference in those days between the speech of the British and the Colonials, but …

Het Eten (The Eating), Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

The following text, in which the last two letters of each word are repeated in the first two of the next, appeared in De Volkskrant of December 4, 1998.

How Big Is English?, Chris Cole

Word Ways

The English language has a complement of somewhere between two million and three million "short" words ...

Palindromic Decalogues, Bill O'Connor

Word Ways

We all need a light to guide us in these troubled times. To this end i present here not one, but four palindromic decalogues, the first pair for the partisans of the gods, the second for those of the giants. Remembering the travails of Moses, the compiler makes no overt claim that either was written by the Finger of God (Exodus 31:18).

Lets Trade Phantom Monkeys, Hugo Brandt Constius

Word Ways

Two words are dual if for every position where one word has a vowel, the other has a consonant and vice versa. Eckler's near-alternating ten-letter words in the August 2000 WOrd Ways exhibit many examples: themselves-Euroaquilo, literature-anatomical, clubfooted-audiophile, etc.

Bananagrams 13, 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 can be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

Common Ground, William Webster

Word Ways

Although each of the names anagrams, first and last, doing so will not solve this puzzle. The solution is a pair of six-letter words.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

A Visit With Dr. Letrix, Michael Keith

Word Ways

When I checked my e-mail that day, one address ([email protected]) caught my eye, though I didn't grasp its significance right away. When I opened it, the message just said "Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Clown's 13th speech, 2nd sentence". I quickly pulled a copy of Shakespeare from the shelf and checked the reference, to find the admonishment.

Fifteen-Letter Transdeletion Pyramids, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

There are two bibles in the world of Scrabble. There's the American bible, the Official Tournament and Club Word List, and there's the British bible. Official Scrabble Words, 4th Edition. Both sources are used widely throughout the world that plays English-language Scrabble. Some countries use one or the other source, and some countries use both sources together. The combination of these two sources is often referred to as "world dictionary".

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Yes & No, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In the following poem, the first and last stanzas use only those letters found next to even digits (2, 4, 6, 8) on the telephone dial, while the middle two stanzas use only odd ones (3, 5, 7, 9). This method of dividing the alphabet puts about twice as many words into the first group (which gets the vowels AIOU) compared to the second (which gets only EY), while Q and Z cannot be used at all.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Ten Riddle-Poems, Paul Maxim

Word Ways

The answers to the following ten riddles are not given in Answers and Solutions. Anyone wishing to verify a prospective answer should communicate directly with me (P.O. Box 120, New York NY 10012), enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope. I request that the prospective answer be accompanied by a signed statement that no answers will be disclosed or published. I offer a cash reward of ten dollars to the first person who mails me the correct answers to any seven of the ten riddles.

Palindromania, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Setup: What Hannibal Lechter said when he had devoured a young girl and had been brought in for questioning.

Answer: MAIDEN LATE-DETAINED 1 AM

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 1

Word Ways

"Anil" is the pen name for Dr. Charles Melton, a retired Ox (Australian) biologist who privately published in 1999 a 98-page booklet, up/dn, a dictionary and contradictory of wordplay including anagrams, palindromes and charades. Word Ways will present excerpts from his book in this issue and future ones.

There, Denis Borris

Word Ways

I can't believe it there isn't there. I'm at the Ottawa Public Library--Rideau Street Branch. Without too much trouble, I just got in the "general"subject" module of the public-use computer, entered TH, hit the return key. Nothing on"there": "therapy" is followed by "thesis".

Eth Rat Coed Face, William Webster

Word Ways

"Lil ware het lickers," Apt dolt Enters, hewn eh acme fro het married.

"Overacts hotting, tub on rani--hared no eth aroid juts won."

"Si het whereat porter kayo?"

"Strut em!" saw Nereis prostie,

"Who arf si het Tar Code Face?"

"Net limes."

Drawn Inward And Other Poems: Part 2, Mike Mcguire

Word Ways

Seasons

Leaves fall.

Approaching winter with regret,

we wonder no less.

Together are beauty and truth,

then truth and beauty

are together less.

No wonder we regret.

With winter approaching,

fall leaves.

One Alphabet Scrabble, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

You're playing solitaire Scrabble, where the bag of tiles has just one of each letter and no blanks. The game is open, i.e. you choose which letters to draw when. After all your plays, deduct the values of the unplayed tiles. How much can you score?

The Origin Of The -Gry Problem, Chris Cole

Word Ways

On page 96 of my book Wordplay (Sterling Publishing Company, 1999) I state that the "-gry" puzzle originated on the Bob Grant talk show on WMCA-AM in New York City and was.