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Aeiou: A Thirty-Year Quest, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

My FAVOURITE words are those in which the five vowels A.E.I.O and U each occur just once. They are referred to as AEIOU words. Over the last thirty years, Word Ways contributors have tried to find examples of these words to satisfy all 120 permutations of the five vowels. Whilst it is relatively easy to find several examples for many of the permutations, for others it is a struggle to find even one. Here, to begin with, is the story of the AEIOU quest.

Furry Dale, David Galef

Word Ways

Won spondee dime dearest ladle gull caul goalie lox. Shill lift mirror beg florist. Wan moaning, goalie lox when tinter florist in sora clottage. "Myra tan ice clottage!" sheathe ought. "Eye single grow incite." Once cinder cottage, goalie lox Caesar bola barge. Goalie lox liquor mouse. Sheep purred barge inter mouse teller ball whiz empathy. Awl sewed heiress media bola barge onus eyed, en shade olive id. Denture scene udder bola barge, ladle ball, innate duress. Allah barge mater fulfill entire. Shoe auk entity bet rune inlay honor bet. In new I'll shoe is no ring.

Alphomic Phrases, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In "Alphomes" in the August 1995 Word Ways, I proposed and defined the term alphome as a set of alphabetically-ordered letters of which at least one arrangement is a word. Some words, like BEEFILY, have their letters already arranged in alphabetical order and in these cases the word and its alphome are one and the same.

Some Properties Of One, Two, Three..., Michael Keith

Word Ways

In this article we explore some properties of the number names: the results of looking at the names of order, or looking at the whole string ONE, TWO, THREE, ...

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Yes, We Have No Ascenders (Part 1), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As I get older, I seem to have more problems reading words I have written quickly, as sequences like "muvuw" become just one wavy line. I wondered what was the longest word that I would represent as a wavy line, and what was the longest wavy-line sequence as part of a word. The letters involved are those with no ascendents or descenders, i.e. aceimnorsuvwxzs. (Actually, I write 'z' with a descender, but that's not how it's printed.) The 'i' is included despite the giveaway dot because, in hurried writing, the dot appears in a rather random position above the wavy …

Tic-Tac-Toe Played As A Word Game!, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

In Problem 48 in Your Move (McGraw-Hill, 1971), David Silverman described a linguistic version of tic-tac-toe consisting of a stockpile of the words ARMY, CHAT, FISH, GIRL, HORN, KNIT, SOUP, SWAN and VOTE. Players alternately selected words, and the first to collect three words sharing a common letter is the winner.

The Gettysburg Distress, Mike Maguire

Word Ways

The following was constructed by rearranging the 1154 letters of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

A New Kind Of Transposal Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In my article "Single and Double Transposal Squares" in the May 1980 Word Ways, I generalized the concept of word square, allowing one to rearrange the letters in each row and column to form a word. Double transposal squares of size three are ridiculously easy to construct. The one on the left below is perhaps the commonest one, consisting of six words each having more than a thousand occurrences in Kucera and Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967): man 1207, him 2619, its 1858, was 9816, who 2252, not 4609.

Edith Plays Word Treblecross, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

Ordinary Treblecross is played by two persons who alternately place the same symbol, a cross, on a 1-by-n strip of squares with the winner being the first player to complete a row of three consecutive crosses. In his very readable book Fair Game (Comap, 1989) Richard K. Guy observes "that it's stupid to play next, or next-but-one, to a cross that's already been made: your opponent could complete three consecutive crosses immediately." Guy continues his study of the game by showing that Treblecross is equivalent to the combinatorial game Nim. Readers of Word Ways may recall the use of Nim …

More Nice N-Isograms, Eric Chaikin

Word Ways

The list of record-typing 2, 3, 4, and 5-isogram sets (bisograms, trisograms, or more generally nIsograms) was augmented recently by a computer search of a database of isograms manually culled from Webster's Third. As with previous exercises, the words conform to Games Magazine criteria of acceptability. This particular database was weighted more heavily in favor of longer words, in an attempt to find the elusive 2.20 to go along with GUNPOWSERY BLACKSMITH. However, none was found! Though the database was large, it was by no means exhaustive; record-breaking specimens may yet exist.

Asleep In The Garden Of Dromes And Drows, James Puder

Word Ways

In yonder garden palindromes

Plaunt morphemes mined from slithy tomes

As, hidden from the whiffling crows,

Dewed doublets, dreaming, drowse in drows.

Word Endings From The Oed, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

"There's been a spate of articles in Word Ways about long words from the Oxford English Dictionary--you know, the longest word beginning with A, then B, and so on up to Z, words using only letters, words with hyphens, words with other characters, main entries, and words buried in illustrative quotations--the whole lot!"

Patentspeak: A New Logoputian Lingo, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In the language Patentspeak (more precisely, its American dialect), every sentence or phrase is required to be the title of a patent issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The number of issued U.S. patents is nearing the six million mark; nonetheless, Patentspeak is still a highly constrained language, due to the range of vocabulary available and the fact that patent titles are usually long phrases, not isolated words.

Strange Names, O. V. Michaelsen

Word Ways

A quick scan of the national White Pages reveals at least five residents named Anita Locke, and an equal number named Anita Key. I am personally familiar with people born with both names. Thankful Bassett (1687-1777) lived in Sandwich Massachusetts. I find the name Phil A. Dinker in the Belmont Massachusetts phone book.

Telephone Tic-Tac-Toe, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the February 1999 issue of Word Ways (page 68), Dave Morice sets one particular challenge to which this short article is a response and slight extension.

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Bananagrams 6, 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.

Who First Found The Panama Palindrome?, James Puder

Word Ways

It is well-known that Leigh Mercer published his immortal "A man, a plan, a canal--Panama!" in the November 13 1948 issue of Notes and Queries. But was his the first discovery? I feel it unlikely that this palindrome remained undiscovered until such a relatively late date. My feelings is based on the following considerations.

Boing!, William Webster

Word Ways

Het vilely Bingos dals ewer smalto deray fro eth wen eyra ta Nash Ensnared Cholos, Brogan, Amine.

Dear Computer, Is The Letter-String A Word?, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In "Is That Letter-String Really a Word?" in the May 1999 Word Ways, Ross Eckler considers the question of determining the plausibility that a given letter string is an English word.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Packing The Cardinals, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In a companion article, Michael Keith discusses the problem of packing the cardinals ONE, TWO, THREE, ... N into various square of rectangular grids of minimum size. This article extends some of his ideas, showing that such grids come in several varieties.

The X-Bird Files, William Young

Word Ways

In the May 1999 Kickshaws, Dave Morice said that he encountered (inprint) a Xantusiid lizard, and wondered whether there are any other X-animals. As an avid birdwatcher, I can answer his question for the feathered portion of the animal kingdom. Of course, I am assuming he is talking about X-birds in the onomatic sense and not in the sense that John Cleese used the term when complaining about his lifeless parrot.

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.

Stab Deletions, Eugene J. Ulrich

Word Ways

Here are some little puzzles based on the fifty two-letter stats abbreviations (STABs) such as AK, AL, AR,AZ, CA... In these puzzles, we begin with a fairly long word and from it remove pairs of adjacent letters that form a STAB so as to leave a much shorter word or term. For example, starting with MINCEMEAT, by deleting MI,NC,MS,ME we have EAT left. Or, starting with MINUTEMAN, by deleting IN,UT,MA we have MEN left. In this case, we chose to delete IN instead of MI, which would have left us with the non-word NEN. Now try your luck with these.

300 Pharmacograms, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Over the years, the pages of Word Ways have contained transposals of all sorts--transposals of names of places, US states, colors, chemical elements, personal names, and so on.

Bananagrams 5, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Many of the following bananagrams were inspired by William Webster's "Stew Inside Curies" in the February Word Ways.

Emit Time Item, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In any of the three texts below, select a word in the first line and use the word-stepping procedure described by Martin Gardner in the Aug 1998 Word Ways: count the number of letters in the word, step ahead by that many words, and repeat this process with each new word reached. The first word arrived at in the next-to-last time is always TIME, no matter what the starting word is. Try it!