Digital Commons Network^™

The Marathon In Palindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

With the encouragement and support of my wife, Pat, I recently walked a marathon (42-195km) for the first time. This experience inspired the following palindromes, purportedly based on quotes collected progressively from a motley crew of international participants during another marathon.

The Listmaker, Dave Morice

Word Ways

I have a habit of making up lists. My very first list, which I wrote in first grade, was a list of all lists I wanted to make in the future. That list began with my second list, which was called "a list of my very first list". My third list came next, but I lost it soon after I made it. My fourth was a list of lists I'd lost. My fifth was a list of things that might have been on my third list.

The "A" Game, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

When someone had a good day on the athletic field, we say "She brought her "A" game with her." Now I invite you to play a different kind of "A" game, one involving charaded homogrpahs and homophones. Each answer consists of words that sound alike, although the words may be spelled differently. The answer will always be in the form of "a + word + word" or "word + a + word". From each definition you are to identify the words.

Butterfly Transadditions, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Over the years, many examples of transadditions have appeared in Word Ways. A transaddition is the result of adding a letter to a word and then rearranging all the letters to form another, longer word. It is relatively easy to start with a single letter and, step by step, achieve transadditions up to length 7 or 8 letters. Longer ones are more difficult.

Textual Logology, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The most important purpose of Word Ways is to present new logological ideas, showing how far one can move beyond the well-trodden paths of palindromes, anagrams, word squares, lipograms and the like. However, it is also important to step back now and then to observe how disparate parts of logology relate to each other, as can be seen in Making the Alphabet Dance. This article shows how various logological concepts appearing in Word Ways during the past thirty years can be grouped in a new logological field, that of textual logology.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Anagrams And Antigrams: An Antigram, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The two short essays below are transposals of each other (that is, each can be formed by rearranging the letters in the other). More precisely, they are antigrams, since one is an essay on anagrams and the other is an essay on the opposite topic, antigrams.

Asian Mormons, Stuart Kidd

Word Ways

Editor's Note: In the August 1992 and February 1994 Word Ways, Harry L. Stern presented a number of poems based on transpostions of friends; names, and in August 1994 Susan Thorpe followed up with a poem on her name. Here is a further example of this genre.

Palindromic Fortune Cookies, John E. Connett

Word Ways

Chinese fortune cookies are famous for their inscrutability; in the May 1988 Kickshaws, Eric Albert reported his favorite, "He Is Kissing a Triding Keepsake Of Yours". Short palindromes are similar, often giving us a skewed view of reality.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Raven Two, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The poem below, including the above title, is an exact anagram of the 4905 characters in Poe's poem "The Raven, the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe", also including its title.

Begin Now, Nick Montfort

Word Ways

In the following love poem all the words are in alphabetical order. I am indebted to the much more extensive, if much less sensible and cyntactical, Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love by Eve Rhymer. Her work contains all the words from a romance novel, alphabetized into 25 chapters (no X). A more sensible and very impressive work of this sort is the last chapter of Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa, a list of alphabetized two-word phrases that recapitulate the novel.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Sign Here, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

I've had more than 500 poems published. Of course, they've been mostly in obscure publications, and by the time I ticked them all off to you they would have disappeared from view. I write a weekly column for our local newspaper, but based on the feedback (none), I wonder if anyone is reading it. Occasionally I get an honorable mention or even a first prize in the New York Magazine Competition and someone might tell me, "Hey I saw your limerick in The New Yorker." O.K., it's not a limerick (not usually) and, it's not the The New Yorker.

Hard-Working Words, Chris Cole

Word Ways

There are about two million words in the English language and exactly twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Therefore, the average English word should be less than five letters long, since there are over eleven million words that can be spelled with five letters. However, in fact the average length of an English word is around twelve letters.

Rat Slink Trestle, William Webster

Word Ways

Het weest ism tasted, "Thaw era orad appels?"

Shore surname," eth ahorse rhamnose periled.

Rented earthed Riding Horse created whit hocks. Ti saw whit retag ferlie, hes cloud being het frits mage.

Bananagrams 11, 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 the issue.

The Name Is The Game, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Al Gore's name spoonerized is "galore" which turns out to be a clever Al Gore rhythm. This year Republicans are experiencing Al Gore-aphobia, but are hoping to Bush whack the opposition. George Bush's name anagrammed becomes "He bugs Gore," and, adding the the W, "He grew bogus" which I realize you may interpret as a Bush League prey on words. Switching first letters of the candidates' last names, we discover that one will gush and the other will bore. Looks like we're in for a Gore-Tex campaign--I hope it doesn't leak. I predict that at the end of the campaign …

Generalized Alternades: Part 1, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article reports on work done on alternades and their generalisations. It presents new longer alternades, trinades, etc., and reports for the first time (as far as I can see) words which have these properties up to three ways-polyalternades or multiple alternades. I have also found words whose extracted words are themselves alternades (multilevel alternades).

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Footwords To Howl, For Solomon, Onon Gonsborg

Word Ways

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Bananagrams 10, 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 the issue.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 33 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Aeiouy Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

With the 30-year quest for AEIOU words now behind us, I have taken the opportunity to add the letter Y and repeat the exercise for AEIOUY words. Y acts as a vowel in words such as symbol and is referred to variously as the sixth vowel, a semi-vowel or a secondary vowel. The world of AEIOUY words, those in which the six vowels A, E, I, O, U, and Y each occur just once, takes us into largely unexplored territory. There are 720 permutations of the six vowels A, E, I , O , U, and Y, six times as …

Wacky Ways With Words, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the May 2000 Word Ways, Lionel Simard's story about Alma Anderson, an avid American amateur acrobat, uses only words starting with the letter A. Can other letters support extended narratives that make reasonable sense? Surprisingly, the letter W can be used, as illustrated by the following story of Winnie and her brother Walter's misadventures in the Wisbeach Woods. The original can be found in Don Lemon's century-old Everybody's Scrapbook of Curious Facts.

Anagramming The Bible, Michael Keith

Word Ways

A book containing apposite letter-unit anagrams of every verse in three complete books of the King James Bible ("The Anagrammed Bible: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon" by Richard Brodie and Mike Keith) was recently published [1]. In this article I present some logological observations and discoveries resulting form the completion of this project.

The Elucidators, Jeremiah Farrell, Frank Harary, Christopher C. Mihelich

Word Ways

In his posthumous work, the mammoth Cyclopedia of Puzzles published in 1914 by his son, the noted American puzzlist Sam Loyd (184101911) includes the problem "Duck Shooting at Buzzard's Bay." This interesting puzzle is reprinted as problem #96in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd (Dover, 1959).

Near-Ideal Nine-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In my article "Snakes and Ladders" in the May 1998 Word Ways, I recorded just one example of a word ladder with nine-letter words. The impression may have been given that it was the only one. As recorded in "Statistics of Word Neighbors". In the November 1997 issue, about 48 per cent of nine-letter words have one or more words that will sit next to them in a ladder, so, given in excess of 100,000 nine-letter words, there will be many ladders.

Mizmaze: The Labyrinth Of Lanugage, Dave Morice

Word Ways

This poem, dedicated to Ross Eckler, uses words that contain all 676 bigrams from AA to ZZ, one per word. The words with bigrams occur in alphabetic order as they are listed on pp. 65-68 of Making the Alphabet Dance. Another 676 words connect them. Each of the 26 stanzas contains the 26 bigram words beginning with the same letter. For instance, the first stanza has all the A-bigram words, from bazAAr to magAZine. The entire poem is both grammatically and bigrammatically correct.