I\u27ve Broken My Word

This is a special kind of search-a-word puzzle. It may be new. Words are built from frags instead of single letters. Each word consists of two but mainly three frags in a line. Read in an orthogonal or diagonal direction; for example, VERY DELI is read as DELIVERY. Note USE TEN HYPO (HYPOTENUSE) on a diagonal in the upper left

Sliding-Block Anagram Puzzle

Here is a project that might appeal to the anagrammers among Word Ways readers. Anagramming is not my game, but maybe others can come up with something clever

Introduction to Word Graphing

Fig la is a S-graph (S for simple). It contains the number names FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE through NINETEEN, TWENTY, THIRTY, FORTY, FIFTY, SIXTY, SEVENTY, EIGHTY and NINETY. The letter Y joins the letters F, S, and E, thus allowing the compounds TWENTY-FOUR to NINETY-EIGHT -- 40 compounds, 64 names in all

Will\u27s Pennies

The March 1993 issue of Games magazine Pencilwise Extra presented the following puzzle by Will Shortz. Cover one letter with a penny, then take the other six letters on the two lines intersecting at the point and anagram them into a word. For example, cover 15 and anagram 3+7+11+13+14+16. Shortz informs me that this puzzle was invented by Jules Roth and examples published in Tip-Top puzzle magazines in the 1960s

More Word Network Spasns in the OSPD

In the February 1989 Word Ways, I examined various word networks based on words from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD). To refresh the reader\u27s memory, a word network consists of a set of words of a given length that can be joined by word ladders (single-letter changes). Each pair of words in a word network can be connected by a minimum-length ladder (one which cannot be reduced by any alternative ladder)

Lewis Carroll\u27s Word Ladders

My knowledge of the history of word ladders comes from two books The Magic of Lewis Carroll by John Fisher (1973), and The Oxford Guide to Word Games by Tony Augarde (1984). It is not necessary to describe word ladders to the readers of Word Ways; in any event the concept should be ovbious from the examples. Carroll started writing about what he called Doublets in 1879; he had originally called them Word Links. The idea, of course, is to find the shortest ladder between a pair of words

Four-Letter Word Network Update

A word network is a set of words of a given length in which any two words differing by only one letter in a single position (such as aunt and runt, or hire and hare) are connected by a line. Using three lines, one can trace out a path leading from any word in a network to any other word in the same network. THe terminal words, together with the intermediate words in the path, form a word ladder, well-known since the days of Lewis Caroll. This article updates a number of recent articles in Word Ways describing the properties of four-letter word networks and ladders

A Note on 3-Dimensional Graphs

Tetrahedron stacking, illustrated below, is a spherical close packing that is identical to cannonball stacking. It neither dominates nor is dominated by two-dimensional k-graphing or s-graphing (discussed in my Feb 1995 Word ways article)

Common 4x4 Wordsquares

In a companion article, the editor estimates the number of m-letter words to be drawn at random from the dictionary in order to have a reasonable expectation of forming an mxm word square. This is a task admirably suited to the computer, which can take a list of words and check all possible combinations for potential squares