Digital Commons Network^™

Literary Lipogrammatic Windows, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article I describe some results of looking for long sections of text in literary works that happen to be lipograms of various sorts. The investigation was carried out by a computer search of the 15000 books (mostly well-known works such as the Bible, the novels of Austen, Dickens, Twain, and so on) that have been put into electronic form by Project Gutenberg.

Headlines I Have Loved, Mary Christie Craig

Word Ways

The headline writers for our local newspaper, the Town Talk, have to be closet punsters. There's no other explanation for the play-on-words banners which so frequently appear in boldface. Here are my favorites, most of which are self-explanatory.

Swapping Terminal Letters, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Richard Lederer in the Nov 1997 Word Ways mentioned words which become other words when their terminal letters are interchanged (the first and the last letter are swapped), as SWINDLES to SWINDLED. He gave seven examples of four-letter pairs, five examples of the "rarer" five-letter pairs, and three examples of six-letter "prize" pairs, given them the title "simultaneous loopers" since the two letters are looped to the other end of the word at the same time.

Geometeric Letters, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

STRAIGHT LINE LETTERS ONLY (AEFHIKLMNTVWXYZ)

Longest word made from straight line letters: possibly METHYLHEXANEAMINE (Dorland's Medical Dictionary). (ZENZIZENZIZENZIc and sym-METHYLETHYLETHYLENE have straight line strings of 15, 19 letters.)

Longest straight line letter heterogram: several, including WILKHAVEN and WYKHAMITE, have 9 letters

Sex And The Taxman, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

This is an extension of the classic palindrome SEX AT NOON TAXES. Originally the piece was titled POLL OR TAX A TROLLOP, but I discarded it, because Vi, Eve, Kate, and Noelle are not loose women. Here, then, are the afternoon and evening trails and temptations of a dedicated, but accommodating (and energetic) revenue collector. Or perhaps it's all just the product of an overactive imagination!

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

All That She Had On Was The Radio, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In De Logologische Ruimte (Meulenhoff, 1984), Rudy Kousbroek honored the French Oulipan Gorges Perec with many wordplay variants of Marilyn Monroe's famous remark about the calendar picture of her in the nude: "All I had on was the radio." The following is a translation of his article (with interpretation for non-Dutch readers).

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

The Adeinrst Alphome, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the May 1999 Word Ways, Rex Gooch introduced the term alphome to readers. This is used to refer to the letters of a word arranged in alphabetical order. For example, AEGINRST is the alphome of the words ASTRINGE, GRANITES, and so on. Elsewhere in the same issue. Ross Eckler noticed the relative paucity of ADEINRST transposals in published sources: DETRAINS, STRADINE, STRAINED, TARNSIDE. According to the statistics presented in his article, ADEINRST should be marginally more fecund than AEGINRST in producing transposals.

Word Trees In Running Text, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Mysterious Precognitions" in the August 1998 Word Ways, Martin Gardner showed how to generate the sequence of words in running text. Start with any word, and use the following (iterative) rule: if the ith word in the sequence has n(i) letters, then the (i+1)st word is located n(i) words further in the running text. For example, take the first sentence of this paragraph: pick IN as the first word, count two words to PRECOGNITIONS, count thirteen more words to A, count one more word to SEQUENCE, and so on.

Yes, We Have No Ascenders (Part 2), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the first part of this article (May 1999), we presented words consisting solely of ascenders (bdfhiklt], descenders (gjpqy), body letters (acemnorsuvwxz), or ascenders or decenders. In this part, we consider words consisting of cyclic mixtures of the various types. For example, Darryl Francis gave SINCIZING and LUTEINIZING as alternating body

Typewriter Words, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article we probe the subject of wordplay based on the typewriter keyboard. Dmitri Borgmann devoted two pages to this topic in Language on Vacation; we start by re-examining his findings and then consider some new topics.

Unlimited-Bag Scrabble, Stephen Root

Word Ways

In the November 1984 Word Ways, Alan Frank presented a 7096-point Scrabble game using an unlimited bag of titles. His dictionary of record was Webster's Second, allowing unsanctioned words like BENZDIOXDIAZINE. Here is a 6250-point solution based on Scrabble-sanctioned words from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and the 10th edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Drawn Inward And Other Poems: Part 1, Mike Maguire

Word Ways

In Umbrage

At one mention,

lying ravens

peck soft hearts.

See kind images

in a memento.

Go dig at her scar.

Let no test end.

Anger

slays her, elapses.

Words Of A Feather, William Young

Word Ways

Have you ever encountered a white-whiskered hermit or a festive coquette? How about a rifleman or a firewood-gatherer? Have you seen a village weaver or a bearded mountaineer? What about a red-tailed comet or a shining sunbeam? If you answered in the affirmative to any of these questions, you are probably a birdwatcher, because these are all names of birds from around the world. The common names of birds reflect a use of language almost as colorful as their plumages.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Split Sentence Transposals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Most of us are familiar with words like HORSESHOER in which the letters making the first half of the word are transposed to make the second half of the word. The following examples can all be found in previous issues of Word Ways, and most recently appeared amongst Rex Gooch's list of pair isograms in the February 1998 issue.

Changing Male Name Fashions 1870-1950, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

This article is based on a talk given to the 23rd Annual Names Institute of the American Names Society on May 5, 1984.

Bananagrams 7, 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 anagrams. Answers will be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Het Fryer Dire, William Webster

Word Ways

Lydia, Ardeb bedmaker no eth Panicle Landis Refry. Het seizable hips saw admen Capelin Leis, refrying myna derris whi ither arcs, struck, fiche, Merits Riant.

Card-Shuffle Anagrams, Michael Keith

Word Ways

Diane sat quietly, watching the evening sunlight speckle through the trees. It would be pretty, she thought, if only it didn't show the dirt on the kitchen window so vividly. "What a mess this place is," she said, half out loud. He would be back soon, and then she would have to ask about the gun in the bedroom drawer. That it was Lent, and she was hungry, only added to her ever-growing list of disgruntlement.

Deb Abed, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The life and loves of Deb, a lady of pleasure who died during the London blitz in the Second World War.

The Persian Version, Leonard Ashley

Word Ways

Now they call it Iran, but we still have Persian cats. Persian lamb, and Persian rugs. We also have a considerable number of words in English derived (usually through French or some other language) from Persian. Can you identify the following

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Cracking The Pi-Code, Dave Morice

Word Ways

To the mathematician, pi is "the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter." To the typographer, pi is "jumbled up type." To the cryptologist, however, pi can be considered a string of digits written in code. A pi-code is simple--ten letters replacing ten numbers. If pi were itself decided, what words would appear?

The Postal Union, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In his first column as Kickshaws editor in February 1989, Dave Morice showed how one could construct chains of state names using their postal codes: for example, MaINe contains the bigram IN which stand for Indiana, INDiana contains the bigram ND which stands for North Dakota. Recently, I realized that this is an example of a directed graph which I discussed in another context in " Directed Word Chains (part 1)" in the August 1991 Word Ways.

Vowel Rotation, Hugh Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

In the Aug 1999 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe presented two lists of words containing all 120 permutations of AEIOU. Here is how such a collection can be woven into a story. Can one be done in English?

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 32 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Abcde In Dutch, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

Susan Thorpe (Word Ways, Feb 1999) asks which of the 120 permutations of ABCDE occur in words. In the context of Word Ways I thought this meant "English word (or name" so I was surprised to see the German verb abdecken and the Polish word abecadto in her list. Surely, French verb abceder (suppurate).

Knight's-Tourlettersquares, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article, I present a new subject for logological study: the knight's-tour letter square. Such a square is constructed by first creating a knight's tour on the chessboard, in which each square of the chessboard is visited exactly once by successive knight's moves. Normally, knight's tours are displayed by numbering the squares of the chessboard with the numbers 1 through 64 to show the knight's path.