Your Wordplay Guide

Sometimes I just get to wondering whether it's possible to find words with certain properties, or to interrelate words in some obscure way. Other times, a word just crosses my path during a word game and I want to find out everything I possibly can about it.

When this happens I'll find myself spending hours and hours thinking and researching, eventually writing up my results in a longish article. Sometimes I've posted the article to a word game newsgroup, but other times I've just kept it filed away somewhere, figuring that one day it might see the light of day.

Well, welcome to the light of day!

This page will provide a new home for my trivial investigations, philosophical ponderings, and other word-related ramblings, which can only be unified under the charming umbrella term of wordplay.

To make the page more useful, I've organized it into a kind of glossary. Eventually, just about any term used to describe a popular form of wordplay will appear here with a brief definition and, in some cases, a link to an article that might interest you.

ANAGRAM

A word, phrase, or sentence, formed by rearranging a given set of letters.

Like most word-lovers I'm interested in discovering very cool examples of anagrams, and I also enjoy it when I stumble across the odd piece of anagram trivia. Most of all though, I'm interested in the subject of how to become good at anagramming, so that's what I've written most about. Here is the introductory page to my ponderings on anagrams

HOOK

A letter that can be added to the front or end of a word to form a new word.

Hooks are extremely important in Scrabble where they provide a place to play a word while picking up extra points at the same time. In fact it is not uncommon for hooks to be played on top of hooks, creating hooking sequences.

One day, this idea led me to an interesting investigation into the seedy side of Scrabble.

PALINDROME

A word, phrase, or sentence that is spelled the same way backwards as forwards (ignoring punctuation characters!).

The theme of my site being Words and Word Games, I'm not particularly interested in palindromic phrases and sentences, but rather in single word palindromes.

WORD STACK

A sequence of two or more equal-length words played along side each other (either horizontally or vertically) forming valid words in the perpendicular direction.

Somebody once mentioned on a Scrabble mailing list that they had been the victim of a highly unlikely counter-play to their opening bonus word. This seemingly trivial story inexplicably piqued my curiosity and eventually led to my equally trivial Inquiry into Parallel Plays. This one includes some very cool puzzles.

So, if you enjoy these sorts of interesting unimportant things, visit this page from time to time. I'm in the process of tidying up old articles and putting them up here for you to browse when you have a bit of free time on your hands.

Once I'm done with my old investigations, I'm sure I'll produce some new ones as lexical curiosities randomly spark my interest, for no particular reason at all. If you've read this far, I'm sure you understand.

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