Opera\u27s Not Over \u27Til Arepo Returns

With the recent discovery in the north of England of yet another example of the famous Latin palindromic square illustrated at the left, it is time to review the mystery surrounding this clever construction. Found at an archeological site in Manchester, this joins the other discoveries in various sites throughout the lands of the former Roman Empire

Afterberners: An Assemblage of Nouns

The English language owes a debt of gratitude of Dame Juliana Berners. She was born circa 1388 and is believed to have been the prioress of a nunnery near St. Albans, Hertforshire, England. Her major contribution to literature is The Boke of St. Albans, a treatise on hawking, hunting and heraldry first published in 1486

Sumwords: A New Crossword Game

The letter B occurs, on average, once in every hundred letters of standard English prose. So, too, do the letters G and V. By contrast, those same hundred letters will include 13 E\u27s, 9 T\u27s, and 4 D\u27s, but J, K, Q, X, and Z will, in all probability, be completely absent. Assigning individual letter values which reflect a realistic view of their frequency of use int he language and including decimal points up to 0.5, we have the following tables

Siamese Triplets

Alongside is a nine-letter word example of my latest development in the technique of the insertion/deletion. As many long words consist of two or more simple words, one can, by considering these elements independently, bring into the realm of wordplay many long words otherwise denied standard treatment. Beauty of presentation is maintained by restricting all actions to within the confines of a rectangle, though other possibilities will be mentioned later. For convenience, therefore, I will refer to the original example as a rectangular triplet

A Pair of Pears Posers

In the May 1995 issue of Word Ways, I drew your attention to one of the problem words of the English language, SERICON, and proposed a tongue-in-cheek solution. Now, wearing a more serious hat, I -ish to mention two other literary grey areas and appeal to you for help in clarifying the situation. In addition to the mystery of SERICON, Pears Advanced Word-Puzzler\u27s Dictionary (Pelham Books, 1987) also confessed ignorance in two of its other entries; I quote directly from pages 574 and 749, respectively

Yet More Fabled Phrases

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Acknowledging the Corn

Ebenezer Cobham Brewer was born in England on May 2, 1810. He was graduated from Cambridge University with first class hours in 1836. Within five years, Dr. Brewer\u27s first book, A Guide to Science, was published, and by 1905 it had gone through 47 editions and sold 319,000 copies in England alone

Triplets: An Added Dimension

When I introduced the concept of Triplets in Pears Word Games the emphasis was upon witty word transformations such as turning WATER into WINE as featured in the February 1991 Kickshaws. In addition I deomonstrated the dramatic shapes one could achieve such as that illustrated alongside which builds up from a valid single-letter word to the largest word possible and returns to a different single-letter word without repeating any word. Yet a third type was featured which is of no consequence to this discussion but all three had the factors in common of being single-word transformations without any restriction upon the number of intermediate stages

Further Fabled Phrases

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The Anglo-American Hyphen

When Queen Victoria was offered a choice of four names for one of her newer overseas possessions, she opted for Fiji as she linked its three dots. In contrast to this word-loving monarch (who is credited with having invented the double acrostic), a conspiracy of lexicogrpahers, those responsible for the OED, spent a large part of her reign introducing a form of word vandalism, the unnecessary hyphen