Those Cryptic British Crosswords

When Will Shortz was gathering material for his recently-published book, World Class Championship Crosswords (Simon & Schuster, 1982), he visited me to consult some of my historical crossword competition material. We soon got into a spirited discussion about inadvertent ambiguity in British-style crossword puzzles: I maintained that the plethora of outs (black squares) in British diagrams allowed crossword fans sometimes to write different correct answers into the same word-path, whereas Will Shortz insisted that the typical British clue would not allow such a possibility

Artificial Adreverbums

Imaginative palindromes have been featured in two recent Word Ways articles: Soap Dealers and Beer Barons by Eugene Ulrish in November 1982, and the The Majestic Palindrome by Dmitri Borgmann in February 1985. Inspired by their monumental achievements, I have created a series of questionable forward-and-backward scrivenings of my own

Out-of-Place Words in Webster\u27s 2nd

For almost fifty years Webster\u27s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, has been the official authority in most word-building puzzle contests. This huge tome of 2987 pages is a veritable storehouse of information; the edition I own and treasure is actually an encyclopedia. My sympathetic wife first purchased it in 1933 from an unemployed father, and I paid for it in monthly installments. Those regular payments helped provide for some of his physical needs for a time, while the book\u27s contents have nourished my mind all these years

Deletions, But No Change in Meaning

While teaching school in bygone years, I frequently constructed educational word games based on Dmitri Borgmann\u27s entertaining column, Word Row, appearing in Books Magazine (1966) and the Puzzle Lovers Newspaper (1968-71). One of his columns discussed Kangaroo Words: words concealed or contained in longer, synonymous words. For example, NURSED appears correctly spelled out in NoURiShED, and FACE is a shorter version of FACadE; many more were exhibited in Language on Vacation and a long list was developed by Tom PUlliam in the May 1976 issue of Word Ways

A Tale of Two Crossword Dictionaries

Ever since the American mania for crossword puzzles began with the publication of the first crossword puzzle book in 1924, many authors have compiled crossword dictionaries as an aid to the harassed solver. I have collected many of these books during the past sixty years, but until recently never tried to infer anything about the sources these authors used from a comparison of their entries with other works

Studies in the photochemistry of solid chlorophyll

Previous work on the photo-oxidation of solid films of chlorophyll has been carried out on samples of copper stabilised chlorophyll, in which magnesium is partly replaced by copper, (one atom in ten); copper being a better co-ordinating atom than magnesium, the effect of this substitution is to stabilise the preparation, the fluorescence is quenched, the phase test is negative, and solid and solutions become more resistant to bleaching under illumination. Illumination of such samples in the presence of oxygen results in a pressure decrease occurring in unit ratio to tie chlorophyll present; the gas phase products of the reaction were believed to be water, carbon dioxide, and acetone, with the water predominating, while the solid residue contained a peroxide group again in unit ratio to the oxidised chlorophyll. The work described in this thesis has been concerned with the comparison of these results with similar studies on plant chlorophyll, freshly extracted from various sources

Changes in the MWPD

There are two separate editions of the current Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary. The first edition of this book, designated the Kangaroo by the publishers, was printed in the usual handy pocket size in April, 1974. In July, 1978, the dictionary was reprinted in larger type and christened the Wallaby edition. In it, several errors and omissions found by George Berryman and me were corrected; the resultant changes are summarized below. To avoid reprinting more than a single page, entries had to be shortened or removed in some cases to accommodate the additions

Pocket Webster Comparison

In the February 1974 Word Ways, Murray R. Pearce presented a most helpful corrective dissertation on errors abounding in the specialized word books published by various contest firms. He rendered a distinctive service to the puzzle-solving readers of this magazine, and to all logologists. His list of omitted words and detected errors are a welcome blessing to prize seekers

A Horse of Another Color

William Van Sant, a government clerk in Washington D.C., won 50 thousand dollars in 1950 by using the word CAMELOPARD to identify an illustration of a giraffe in a contest puzzle. This unfamiliar word united perfectly with other object-names in a diagram that yielded a higher numerical total (based on letter-values) than it would have had he used GIRAFFE. His achievement demonstrated the importance of having a large collection of synonyms as an aid in contest puzzle-solving

A Double Word Square Contest

Most readers of Word Ways know that a double word square is one in which the vertical words differ from the horizontal ones. The following 5-by-5 double word squares all consist of common words which can be found in the New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary