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Bananagrams 12, Edmund Conti Feb 2001

Bananagrams 12, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams--anagrams to drive you bananas--consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair or 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 the issue.

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Theme And Variations, John E. Connett Feb 2001

Theme And Variations, John E. Connett

Word Ways

John Connett is one of the most prolific composers of short palindromic phrases. These often come in related families, as shown most spectacularly in "Ed's Palindromic Trickery" in the May 2000 Word Ways. Here are a number of further examples.

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Answers And Solutions Feb 2001

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Colloquy Feb 2001

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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A Calculated Display, Susan Thorpe Feb 2001

A Calculated Display, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The numbers which appear on the LCD of a calculator are made of a series of straight-line segments. For the purpose of the current exercise, I ignored (a) the gap junctions between the straight-line segments and (b) the fact that the numbers are displayed at an angle. The game is to turn the ten numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 on the calculator display into words. To do this, I started with a three-by-five grid of 15 cells, the smallest possible grid for the exercise. When drawn on the grid, each number occupies specific …

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Pi Words, Howard Bergerson, Michael Keith Feb 2001

Pi Words, Howard Bergerson, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The number pi (= 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288...) is fundamental to the very fabric of the universe, so it's not surprising to encounter it in a number of logological contexts. In this article we explore families of words having a connection with the value of pi. Unless noted, all words are in Webster's Third Unabridged.

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Residual Heterograms, Susan Thorpe Feb 2001

Residual Heterograms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A heterogram is a word with no repeated letters. Residual heterograms are made by discarding letter repeats in words and then rearranging the remaining letters to form a word. Words with repeated letters can be divided into.

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Compassionate Conservative, Mike Morton Feb 2001

Compassionate Conservative, Mike Morton

Word Ways

I keep hearing this "compassionate term". Not being quite sure what it means, I figure there's one sure way to find the deeper meaning.

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Fortune Cookie Fortunes, Dave Morice Feb 2001

Fortune Cookie Fortunes, Dave Morice

Word Ways

I've written fortune cookie fortunes for a long time, but I haven't sold any of them. I do it just in case I run across a fortune cookie publisher who needs a few gems of wisdom for that thin piece of paper that is to a fortune cookie what the cream filling is to a Hostess Cupcake. Here are some of my fortune cookie fortunes--all guaranteed true.

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Panalphabetic Windows In Literature, Michael Keith Feb 2001

Panalphabetic Windows In Literature, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The pangrammatic window in running text has been extensively studied, but its cousin in panalphabetic window (containing each letter of the alphabet at least once, and in alphabetical order) has been somewhat neglected. In this note I explore accidental panalphabetic windows in existing works of literature. Specifically, the 1500 works of the Project Gutenberg CD-ROMs were examined by a computer program to determine the smallest window in each, after which some of the more remarkable ones were culled for presentation here.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 1 Feb 2001

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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An Automatic Palindrome Generator, Bill A. O'Connor Feb 2001

An Automatic Palindrome Generator, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

In 1984 Dan Hoey, a US naval mathematician, wrote a computer which he used to create a 540-word expansion of Leigh Mercer's "Panama" palindrome (PD). It began "A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac..." and ended "...a calmus, a diaryman, a bater, a canal Panama." (For the full PD, plus additional information, see http://www2.vo.lu/homepages/phahn/anagrams/panama/htm.)

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Fractured English Defractured, Don Hauptman Feb 2001

Fractured English Defractured, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

In the July 22, 1990 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Bill Bryson guest-wrote the "On Language" column, substituting for the vacationing William Safire. Titled "A Taste for Scrambled English," the column focuses on the garbling of American English around the world.

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Super-Ideal Seven-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch Feb 2001

Super-Ideal Seven-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the case of 7-letter words, almost one-third are heterograms, the fraction of isolanos decreases to about a quarter, and for the first time we have some onalosis (words in which each letter can be changed independently to make another word). Moreover, we only have to find eight related words for each ladder. These facts mean that the number of ladders starting and ending with heterograms with every letter differing between the two words, increase over a thousandfold to nearly 100,00, and more common words appear.

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Back Cover Feb 2001

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Six-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch Feb 2001

Six-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

By the time we reach six-letter words, conditions for superior ladders are much improved: nearly one-half of six-letter words are heterograms (all letters are different), the fraction of isolanos (words which have no neighbours) decreases to less than one-tenth, there is a reasonable number of onalosis (words which have neighbours for each letter change), and each word has on average almost six neighbours (one for each letter). In this article, we therefore only consider ladders in which the terminal words are heterograms, with corresponding letters different, and with letters replaced in order. Even so, there are about fifty thousand of …

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Alphabetically Ordered Prose, Richard Sabey Feb 2001

Alphabetically Ordered Prose, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

Absolutely accurate alphabetical arrangement as basic constraint determines eligibility. Elsewhere, evidently, examples exist. Here, however, I implicitly include inflated initial iteration. Judiciously, keep lengthy lists meaningful. Mind, moreover, my not ordaining panalphabetism, pangrams quite readily require some texts to use (usually) utterly vapid verbiage, "xylophone", "your", "zippers".

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Knotted Word Worms, Michael Keith Feb 2001

Knotted Word Worms, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In an article in the August 1993 Word Ways, Ross Eckler introduced the concept of a word worm, an object defined on the three-dimensional lattice of integer-valued points. Each point on this lattice has 26 neighbors which can be reached by a single orthogonal or diagonal step. These 26 stepping directions are identified with the 26 letters of the alphabet as shown in Figure 1. This positive X direction is defined by the N-step, the positive Y direction, by the K-step, and the positive Z direction, by the E step.

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Clock Words, Susan Thorpe Feb 2001

Clock Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

To understand my episode of horological horror, various things need to be explained. I began by assigning a number of minutes to each letter of the alphabet so that A occupies one minute, B two minutes, C three minutes through Z 26 minutes. The time occupied by a word is therefore equal to the sum of the minutes occupied b y each of its letters. Thus the word TIME occupies a period of 47 = 20 + 9 + 13 + 5 minutes.

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Kickshaws, Dave Morice Feb 2001

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Linguistic Issues: Is Plain English The Answer To The Needs Of The Jurors?, Leon D. Lazer Jan 2001

Linguistic Issues: Is Plain English The Answer To The Needs Of The Jurors?, Leon D. Lazer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

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How Many Anagrams Are There?, Rex Gooch Nov 2000

How Many Anagrams Are There?, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This short article was prompted by the formula for Prob(N) in Michael Keith's "What are the odds that X is an anagram of Y?" in Word Ways, August 2000. It seemed to me that multiplying the values of that function by the square of the number of words of a given length might be expected to give an estimate of the number of words of a given length that are permutations of another word.

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Near-Ideal Eight-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch Nov 2000

Near-Ideal Eight-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As we move from 9- to 8-letter words, the number of neighbours per word increases by one-third, so the number of ideal ladders (those which change every letter in the minimum number of steps) jumps from about 50 to a few thousand. The percentage of heterograms doubles to a significant 20 per cent, so that the number of ladders between heterograms (with just one unchanged letter in the eight steps) explodes to over six thousand. Combining these facts, for the first time we find ideal ladders between heterograms, thus fulfilling the first three conditions for the elusive Connoisseur's Ladder. The …

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Generalized Alternades: Part 2, Rex Gooch Nov 2000

Generalized Alternades: Part 2, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

For a discussion of Generalized Alternades the reader is referred to the first part of this article in the August 2000 Word Ways. There examples of the simplest kind of alternade were given: single words with component parts read in the same directions, as TRIENNIALLY = TINILY + RENAL (stride length 2) or PACIFICATORY = PICO + AFAR + CITY (stride length 3).

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Art Xtra, A. Ross Eckler Nov 2000

Art Xtra, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Daniel McGarth writes "Exxon is one of my favorite words. It occurred to me this morning the question of whether there is any way that you could create a palindrome containing that word..."

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 33 Issue 4 Nov 2000

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 33 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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Multiple Bigrams, Susan Thorpe Nov 2000

Multiple Bigrams, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A group of two successive letters is called a bigram. There are 26 different bigrams beginning with each letter of the alphabet making a total of 26x26 = 676 different bigrams. The word BIGRAM itself incorporates the five bigrams BI, IG, GR, RA and AM, and none of them is repeated. COCOa, DEriDE, IOnizatIOn and tORpOR, on the other hand, each contain a pair of identical bigrams and there are thousands of these double bigram words ("Miami Words" in the February 2000 Word Ways are a special kind of double bigram word). Somewhat less common are words such as fINgerprINtINg …

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Aeiou: Supervocalics In Webster's Third, Eric W. Chaikin Nov 2000

Aeiou: Supervocalics In Webster's Third, Eric W. Chaikin

Word Ways

FOUNDING FATHERS and WOMAN SUFFRAGISTS, get out your FOUNTAIN PENS-it's time for another visit to the world of AEIOU. To do justice to my fascination with all things AEIOU, I recently introduced the term SUPERVOCALIC to refer to any item, be it word, phrase or proper noun, containing each of the five vowels once and only once, and no Y. The term is modeled on the existing word 'univocalic' which describes a word or phrase that contains only one vowel (potentially repeated, as in 'Mississippi' or Ellen DeGeneres'). It has the added appeal of being self-referential, that is to say …

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The Pangram Film Festival Revisited, Richard Sabey Nov 2000

The Pangram Film Festival Revisited, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

In the February 2000 issue of Word Ways, Douglas Fink reported on the Pangram Film Festival. The idea is to construct a list of film titles which are collectively a pangram (i.e., they use every letter of the alphabet) which is a heterogram (i.e., they do not use any letter more than once). Digits and punctuation may be used freely. Douglas's article raised questions as to what superlatives are possible among heterogram pangram film lists (from now on in this article, usually just "lists"). Here are some of my answers to this question, followed by questions of my own.

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My Life In The Headlines, William Young Nov 2000

My Life In The Headlines, William Young

Word Ways

I frequently talk to reporters when i am at work. My name has appeared in my publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and even People Magazine. I used to enjoy being quoted, but now I would prefer that "William Young" never be used as a source for information. The possibilities of misquotations and lots of follow-up calls far outweigh any pleasure I feel upon seeing my name. I now do not even bother to save most of the newsclips that quote me.

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