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Willard Espy, 1910-1999

Word Ways

Willard Espy, wordplay's great and good friend, died in New York on February 20, 1999 at the age of 88. It is difficult to do justice to this many-faceted man in a short tribute. I first learned of him when he published his first wordplay book, The Game of Words, in 1972. I reviewed it in the August 1972 Word Ways, mildly chiding him for an inadequate index and the lack of up-to-date examples of transposals and word squares.

Let Your Fingers Do The Wordplay, Michael Keith, Dave Mroice

Word Ways

Dmitri Borgmann's Language on Vacation includes the following tibit concerning wordplay and the telephone dial: "It appears that the longest word which can be dialed using only letters that appear with odd numerals is WELL-EXPRESSED, and that... with even numerals NONCOMMUNICATING." It seems to us that the first example is an adjectival phrase; the longest single words appear to be PERPLEXEDLY or SLEEPLESSLY. (If you want a longer adjectival phrase, consider the sentence "SELFLESSLY-DEFERRED pleasures are often the best kind.") We can't quibble with the second example except to point out that NONCONTAMINATING ties it for length.

Wuthering Flapdocks! Yet More Bisograms, James Puder

Word Ways

A word in which no two letters are the same is often called an isogram. In an article in the August 1998 Word Ways, Eric Chaikin coined the term bisogram to identify word pairs in which no letters occur more than once. High-quality bisograms are essentially defined as those which contain only uncapitalized unhyphenated unabbreviated words which are listed in boldface type in Webster's Third; appropriate noun

A History Of Word Puzzling, Mary J. Hazard

Word Ways

The National Puzzlers' League, founded as the Eastern Puzzlers' League in New York City in 1883, is devoted to the creation and solution of versified word puzzles, as popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as crosswords and cryptograms are today. In the fall of 1998, the League privately published The National Puzzlers' League--The First 115 Years, a 380-page bound volume issued free (upon request) to its members and available to others for $14 plus postage (the editor has copies available).

Deep In A Can I Peed, John E. Connett

Word Ways

Palindromists have a reputation for racy subject-matter. Remember Dennis and Edna who (often with others) sinned? Or Naomi's lover who moans that sex at noon taxes? Or the anonymous slut who nixes sex in Tulsa? Other bodily functions can be similarly celebrated.

A Ryde Through The Country, William Young

Word Ways

Once upon a time, there was an innocent young woman who called herself the MAIDEN BRADLEY, but everyone knew her as Nancy. Nancy lived out in the country at the end of a LONG STREET in a small house next to many GREAT ELM trees. She loved the huge trees, and told her friends that she could sit and watCH ELMS FOR Days without getting bored. She was especially fascinated by a large NEST ON top of one of the trees which was occupied by two ferocious hawks.

Reverse Homophonic Charades, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Pronunciation, as we know, varies widely, not only between the United Kingdom and the United States, but within the United Kingdom itself. From this article, you may correctly deduce that my roots lie in the north of England, rather than the south of England where I now live. Most of the unfamiliar words can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition.

The Enigmatic Yams Of May, James Puder

Word Ways

In May, a palindromist's fancy turns to thoughts of John Pool's old chestnut, "May a banana nab a yam? Although modern palindromy cannot yet produce a plummy answer to this pithy question, it has raised a bumper crop of nutty queries from the same palindromical rootstock.

How Many Alphomes Are There?, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

An alphome consists of the letters of a word arranged in alphabetic order. In "The Commonest Alphomes" in this issue, I presented the most common alphomes for many word-lengths. Here I look at alphomes en masse, but only dealing with those found in well-known dictionaries.

The Commonest Alphomes, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

An alphome consists of the letters of a word placed in alphabetical order, AEGINRST, AELRST and others have been the subject of intensive work over many years, the object being that make as many words as possible using each letter just once per word. Although I agree that these strings were the most common (or threreabouts) of their length, I note that the lists produced were more than an order of magnitude larger than the number of occurrences even in the largest dictionary I have seen.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Is That Letter-String Really A Word?, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most people would agree that SORNIE looks like a word, but DKYODZ does not. Can subjective judgements like these be codified? Can they be translated into explicit rules that rate the word plausibility of a letter-string? This article suggests a few rules, and speculates how they might be combined to forms a super-rule for discriminating between plausible words and impossible combinations. For strings of any length, such rules are likely to be computationally burdensome, requiring a computer to implement them. I propose several rules for letter-strings of length three, and show how well they perform. I then take the best …

The Grinning Cow And His Successors, Mike Morton

Word Ways

As an anagrammist I found the game of musical chairs for the House speakership in late 1998 too good to ignore. Newton Gingrich (the grinning cow) resigned shortly after the November elections, to be replaced by candidate Bob Livingston (glib bison on TV). He in turn removed himself from consideration after certain infidelities came to light, and was supplanted by Dennis Hastert (I hasten trends), another guy we've never heard of.

Eva, Eh? In A Can I Heave!, John E. Connett

Word Ways

In I Love Me, Vol. I, Mike Bonner recognizes a handful of palindromes involving Eva and a cave, including "Eva, can I pose as Aesop in a cave" and "Eva, can I stab bats in a cave?," both attributed to Leigh Mercer, and "Eva can, I see, bone no bees in a cave," by J.A. Lindon. However, there's lots more that can be said about our troglodytic Eva.

A Statename Chain Revisited, Dan Tilque

Word Ways

"Where are you from?"

"Indiana, Pennsylvania."

"Huh? Make up your mind. Are you from Indiana or Pennsylvania?"

"Both. I'm from the town of Indiana in the state of Pennsylvania."

Top Row Typing, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A deservedly favourite question is: what is the longest English word that can be typed using only the top row of the typewriter? The very apt answer is TYPEWRITER, at 10 letters. Staying with the QWERTY (not, newspaper column that QUIETWRITER at 11 letters was longer, and also appropriate, as the IBM Quietwriter (a high quality quiet electronic typewriter or printer) also had the QWERTY layout.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Het Clabbers Downplay, William Webster

Word Ways

Eth wot slag ewer ta het mage moor leary; agree, deray. Ungird mage eon, earn eth den, ti saw Savin runt; Barde soling baldy. Myna shook ewer garnets. Fro ancients, ate no REHEAT; ta het felt. Wot sword lustering--MOTHERS drawdown. Eth eon cores earn het einstein.

Alphabetic Trigrams And Tetragrams, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Many words contain a trigram comprising three consecutive letters of the alphabet. The most commonly occurring are DEF (DEFine, DEFeat, DEFt, etc.) and STU (STUck, STUb, paSTUre, etc.).

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 32 Issue 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Every Word-Pair In This Set Has One Crash, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

More than twenty years ago, in the February 1978 Word Ways, I challenged readers to find a set of eight seven-letter words in which every one of the 28 possible pairs had exactly one crash (one letter-match in the same position, as foRce and maRy, or caSinos and miSrule).

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 32 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Scrubwoman Edith Meets W.R. Hamilton, Zhi Hong Chen, Jeremiah Farrell, Thomas Rodgers

Word Ways

At an Omnium Gatherum in honor of Martin Gardner held in Atlanta in January 1998, one of us presented the following word puzzle for the amusement of the attendees.

Recreated, William Young

Word Ways

The following poem consists of two stanzas of fifteen lines each. Each of the lines can be typed with the keys on only one side of the typewriter.

Abstemious, Price, Fibonacci, Square Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Firstly, I should like to apologize in advance should anyone be able to point out that braver efforts than mine have appeared in Word Ways before. Still it is not without interest to compare the state of knowledge in (mainly) 1972 with that of today. The common theme among these types of words is that only certain letters are permitted, though not every permitted letter must be used, and more than one copy of each letter is permitted. These words are relatively scarce--roughly one is every thousand words or fewer. Some readers may wish to glance first at the table …

Twenty-Twenty Vision, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Playing with 2x2 and 3x3 squares constructed from word chains made me curious as to how far the exercise could be taken; the table on the next two pages is the result. Each horizontally-adjacent pair of words makes another word (many of these are hyphenated) or a two-word phrase, reading either from left to right or from right to left (follow the arrows). Each vertically-adjacent pair of words is similarly linked when read from left to right, and another word/phrase when read from right to left (similarly upwards and downwards); these two-way pairs are indicated by double-headed arrows.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

The Most Versatile Palindrome, Jeff Grant, Pat Grant

Word Ways

What palindromic word has the most different meanings? The answer to this intriguing question requires some research. There are many common palindromes with four or more letters -- DEED,NOON, PEEP, SEES, TOOT, CIVIC, LEVEL, MADDAM, etc. -- but their scope is somewhat limited. The solution must surely lie at the three-letter level where 'dromes abound.

The Piku, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The word-length pi mnemonic has been around for some time; a classic example, said to have been composed by physicist Sir James Jeans, is: