Making the alphabet dance : recreational wordplay / Ross Eckler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eckler, Ross.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Word games.

Genre:

Puzzles and games.

Physical Description:

xx, 279 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Summary:

Problems aimed to challenge the reader's thinking power.

Contents:

Introduction / Martin Gardner

1. Forbidden Letters, Obligatory Letters. 1. Lipograms. 2. Vowel Language. 3. Consonantal Characterization. 4. Acrostics. 5. Text-Determined Obligatory or Forbidden Letters. 6. Telephone Words and Polyphonic Ciphers. 7. Word Dice. 8. Is Q Always Followed by U?

2. Letter Patterns and Distributions. 1. Palindromes. 2. Tautonyms. 3. Switch Words. 4. Word Graphs. 5. Word Tiles. 6. Isograms. 7. Pangrams. 8. The Pangrammatic Window. 9. Letter Distributions

3. Word Fragments. 1. Bigrams, Trigrams, Tetragrams. 2. Consecutive Identical Letters. 3. Cadences. 4. Letters Anywhere in the Word. 5. Anchored Letters. 6. Internal Palindromes and Tautonyms

4. Transforming One Word into Another. 1. Insertions and Deletions. 2. From Ladders to Word Networks. 3. A Mathematical Digression: The Structure of Word Networks. 4. From Strings and Rings to Directed Networks. 5. Half-Overlapping Directed Networks and Word Frags. 6. Transpositions. 7. Special Transpositions. 8. Transpositions of Phrases and Text. 9. Transdeletions and Transadditions

5. Alphabetical Order and Scoring. 1. The Last Word. 2. Words Containing Adjacent Alphabetical Letters. 3. A-to-Z Word Lists. 4. Homonyms of the Alphabet. 5. Words Classified by Alphabetic Properties. 6. Letter-Shifts, Shiftgrams, Collinear Words. 7. Scrambled Alphabets. 8. Letter-Scoring. 9. Word Balance

6. Word Groups. 1. Word Squares. 2. Variations on the Square. 3. Partially Overlapping Word Groups.

4. Crashing and Noncrashing Word Groups. 5. Letters on Solids. 6. Letters on Tiles. 7. Maximally Differentiated Word Sets. 8. Word Packs

7. Number Words. 1. Self-Enumerating Sentences. 2. Cardinal Convergence. 3. Alphabetizing the Cardinals. 4. Number Oddities. 5. Alphamagic Squares. 6. Self-Descriptive Number-Names. 7. Base 27

8. Afterword. 1. The Alphabet Cube. 2. Word Worms. 3. Long Words.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-269) and index.

ISBN:

0312140320

9780312140328

OCLC:

33164354