Word Games
By: The Stickler
Tags: Word Ladder, Words, Word Game, Games, Anagram

Photo by Amador Loureiro from https://unsplash.com/

Words are indispensable and can also be a basis for amusing games, which, in turn, could also have educational value for young students learning vocabulary. Here are 3 that I like.

The 3-letter game. This is original with me, as far as I know. I have played it only once with another person, but it seems to work and can be played with 2, 3 or more people. The first player says a word, and the next person has to say a word that starts with its last three letters. Words may not be repeated. Here is an example:

You, arduous; me, ouster; you, terminate; me: atelier, etc.

If I don’t think your word will work, I challenge you. Suppose I challenge you on terminate. Then you say atelier, so I get a demerit. It doesn’t matter that you can’t think of a word starting with ier; in fact that’s what makes it a good choice tactically. If you had said ateliers, the game could have proceeded with erstwhile, ileitis, tisane, anecdote, etc. (I can’t think of a word starting with ote.) Anyway, sooner or later one is bound to reach a dead end. The player with the fewest demerits wins. Here’s another sequence: given, vendor, dormouse. Of course there are many such.

Anagrams. Challenge another player to make an anagram of a word, like draw/ward, with extra credit if he or she thinks of a palindromic solution. There are web sites for generating anagrams, like https://wordsmith.org/anagram/. This can be competitive with rules as for the 3-letter game.

Word ladders. This is more familiar. Consider the words top and sin. Here is a word ladder that connects them: top ton tin sin. Or: top ton son sin. Each ladder has the minimum possible number of steps, 3. There are 4 other such ladders than connect them. In other words, you can connect them in 3 steps in every possible way. Therefore, I call top and sin a perfect pair. Here are some more perfect pairs: get and rum, hug and ram, bad and cut, bad and leg, hot and pad. (Check them for yourself!) I think there must be plenty more. (It’s more fun if the 2 words have a relationship, like bad and cut.)

Perfect pairs of words with 4 letters are another matter. In my experience, a typical ladder is 6 steps for 4-letter words. Words that start and end with consonants seem to work best.

One pair that comes to mind is “soup to nuts”, because it is a familiar American English idiom that means from beginning to end. It is derived from the description of a full course dinner, in which courses progress from soup to a dessert of nuts. (See my essay on obesity.) I once envisioned a game show to be called “Soup to Nuts,” with contestants vying to make good word ladders, even to the extent of pitching my idea to a guy with TV connections, but it didn’t materialize. Of course, a good progression from soup to nuts would require 4 steps. I have seen this done as follows: soup, sous, sots, nots, nuts. But sous is basically French, and nots seems a bit of a stretch! Keeping it honest, I haven’t been able to find a solution with fewer than 11 steps: Soup, sour, pour, poor, moot, loot, lost, lest, less, lets, nets, nuts. Any suggestions from viewers?

Now, getting a little fanciful about this subject, I envision a great multidimensional ladder of interconnected words, of which the following is a sample:

line

|

pane — lane — land

|

lade

Like a verbal parallel universe!

Have fun and maybe learn something!