Digital Commons Network^™

The Tetrahedron Game, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the November 1978 Word Ways, Mary J. Hazard introduced a word game by Dave Silverman in which two players alternately assign letters to the vertices of a cube with the objective of forming four-letter words on the vertices of each face. Specifically, a player loses the game if he is unable to form words on all faces on which his letter fills in the last open vertex. If this never occurs, then the player who fills in the last open vertex on the cube wins the game.

Michael Walsh's Review Of R. M. W. Dixon's The Languages Of Australia, Michael Walsh

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Paul L. Garvin's Review Of Kenneth L. Rehg And Damian G. Sohl's Ponapean Reference Grammar, Paul L. Garvin

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information about this issue, including a table of contents.

He's Like A Lamp, I Swear!, Merlin X. Houdini Iv

Word Ways

A brilliant light shining down through the long Corridor of Time is, indeed, an apt figure of speech for WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the dramatist whose name has been anagrammed to create a title for this article.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections, and comments about earlier articles appearing in Word Ways. Comments received up to a month prior to publication of an issue will appear in that issue.

The Monosyllable Machine (Part 2), Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

Now, thrill as I may to the charisma of Zuw bin-Miytbol, the virtuosity of the Salami Staters, ant he splendorous sonorities of Wagner, the surfeit of ecstasy represented by a combination of all three seemed to me at the time hardly describable as soothing. I therefore, not without some trepidation, conveyed this sentiment to the philological four-footer and was delighted to hear him suggest then that we listen, rather, to The Moldau, The Barcarole, or the Scheherazade Suite.

We Few?, Chaim Fleischman

Word Ways

In this quiz the answer to each clue is a palindrome; to aid in the solution, word-divisions and all vowels are given. The first letters of all sixteen palindromes will spell out another palindrome when read from top to bottom. Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

An Amazingly Appealing Addiction, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

I am an alliteration addict, a slave to the seductions of sequential stressed syllables starting with the same sounds.

Blunt Instrument Caper, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

Police Lieutenant Arthur Jamison scanned the typewritten verse, verified that each letter was correctly positioned, then glanced up at Sergeant Robert Johnson who stood in front of his desk.

Yes, Indeed, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

Where the Germanic tribes left their heartland to begin their conquest of Europe about the turn of the millennium, their word for YES was ja. Most Germanic languages have retained that form. However, the Anglo-Saxons changed the Old Teutonic ja to gia which became YEA when Anglo-Saxon became English. Anglo-Saxon, a highly inflected language had another affirmative word, gise, a combination of gia + si (the third person singular present subjective of beon, "to be"), meaning "Yes, it is so." Gia + si or YEA + si was originally used as an answer to that class of …

Transposition Rings, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Take the word TEA and transfer the last letter to the start, obtaining ATE. Repeat this operation on ATE to get its present tense, EAT. A final transfer returns us to the original word, TEA, completing the cycle. It is not difficult to find other examples using rarer three-letter words; in the July 1975 Games & Puzzles, Darryl Francis exhibited five more based on the letters AIT, ASP, EON, ETH and ICH (all fifteen words can be found in Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary).

Words That Didn't Make It, Frank A. Magary

Word Ways

The following words are not in the dictionary, at least in the sense expected. The clues are how such words would be defined if they had made it to Webster's.

A Maximum Mono- And Di-Syllabary, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

This is an attempt to list the longest English-language words of one or two syllables, beginning with each letter of the alphabet, according to listings and pronunciations in Webster's Second or Third editions. The -ED ending is permitted for verbs, and the -S ending for nouns, even when permission to pluralize is not explicitly given in Webster. However, hyphenated words have been excluded.

High-Scoring Boggle, Alan Frank

Word Ways

The game of Boggle consists of sixteen cubes with letters on each face, which form a random 4-by-4 array when thrown like dice into the holes of a plastic grid. The object of the game is to form as many words as possible in three minutes, using the King's Move in chess, but without using any cube more than once in spelling out a word. Three and four letter words are scored one point, five letter words two points, six letter words three points, seven letter words four points, and eight letter words or longer eleven points.

Calendar Transadditions, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

In the May 1982 Kickshaws, Darryl Francis challenged Word Ways Readers to find Websterian transadditions of the Jewish, Muhammadan, Hindu and French Revolutionary calendar names (all listed in Webster's). I have accepted this challenge, with the results given below. Most of the words can be found in both Webster's Second and Third Editions, but those followed by 2 are only in Webster's Second. An asterisk denotes a pure transposition; no added letters were needed.

Kickshaws, Louis Phillips

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

An Improved One-Move Scrabble Game, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

In the November 1981 Word Ways, I presented a SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game using Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980) in which a single-move scored 1665 points. By substantially modifying the diagram, I have increased this to 1677 points.

Nicknames Of The United States, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

All of these United States have nicknames, some affectionate and some at least originally derogatory. The Old Dominion is the oldest, and The Lone Star State perhaps the best-known. See if you can match the state name to each of these nicknames and, while you are at it, see if you can invent better nicknames for some of them, as well as for the inhabitants of some of the states. Be warned that some states appear more than once in the following quiz. Answers can be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

Czech Words With Diacritical Marks, Stanislav Tvrdik

Word Ways

This article lists words in Czech having a diacritical mark over every letter -- that is, the little line, the little hook, or the little circle. There are fifteen different letters that can be used.

Pair And Trio Isograms, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In Language on Vacation, Dmitri Borgmann states that non-pattern words (words with no letter repeated), such as DERMATOGLYPHICS, are just a special case of the isogram, in which each letter is used an equal number of times -- once, twice, three times, etc. Before looking at words where each letter is used more than once, let us exclude the three classes of words not considered legitimate isograms by Mr. Borgmann.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Pan-Crashing Word Sets, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Two words of the same length are said to crash with each other if they contain the same letter in the same position; thus, TORUS and SNOUT crash because both have the letter U in the fourth position, but GUFFAW and MAIDEN do not. FIGHT and MIGHT crash in several positions simultaneously.

Interviewing "Ronald Wilson Reagan", Howard W. Bergerson

Word Ways

As a rule, VIPs are likely to be interviewed only by other equal or lesser VIPs. But there is an even stronger rule, little known and indubitably of less consequence, that only VUPs are ever observed interviewing a Big Name in the literal sense, and like all bizarre aberrations in nature it is observed only rarely. I am not speaking of interviewing a Big Name in the figurative sense as Barbara Walters would do, which really means interviewing the actual person. No, I speak of interviewing only the Name itself, which in the present instance is composed of eleven distinct …

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover, including instructions to authors.

Creative Chronograms, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

Chronogram? What's that? A new digital watch?

Not quite. It's an intriguing form of word play, more popular several centuries ago than it is today. If you like tinkering with words and enjoy a creative challenge, then chronograms are for you. But a note of caution is in order: chronograms can be addicting.

Long Digrammatic Strings, Alan Frank

Word Ways

In 1969, Word Ways published a trigram list by Faith and Ross Eckler; based on the 5th and 7th editions of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, it gave the "most common" word for each trigram the authors could find. Since that time, Philip Cohen has greatly extended the list by mining Webster's Unabridged as well as various gazetteers and other references. For some letter-groups, such as ESS, a trigram is almost too trivial to be worth printing; but others, such as JVJ, are so hard that one would be pleased to find a word containing a bigram using two of these three …

Iambic Idiosyncrasy, Helen S. Van Ummersen

Word Ways

Word Ways readers may recall my "Potpourri" in the August 1981 Kickshaws, a poem consisting of lines from many different poets. If the following poem does not seem to make a great deal of sense, there is a very good reason; it, too, is a poetic patchwork. Can you identify the poets? (Warning: three of the lines are my own.) Identifications are given in the Answers and Solutions.

The Monosyllable Machine (Part 1), Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

A late June day's unseasonable heat caused by Southern California's own native foehn, chinook, harmattan, khamsin, sirocco, or simoom, known in the Southland as the Santa Ana wind, found me again in Dr. H. K. Wombat's cool and spacious study, The Marsupium, filled with the fragrance of strawberries as the maestro and I sipped enormous milk shakes prepared by the furry savant's elegant and enigmatic housekeeper.

Undominated Alphabetic Sequences, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In past Word Ways articles, various authors have explored words which contain consecutive letters of the alphabet (1) in order and adjacent to each other, (2) in order but not necessarily adjacent, and (3) neither in order nor adjacent. The longer the consecutive-letter sequence that can be found in a word, the more noteworthy it is; for example, oveRSTUffed is clearly more interesting to the logologist than fiRST. I define alphabetic sequence as undominated if a word can be found containing all the letters in that sequence, but no word can be found containing any longer sequence including all the …