Word ladder

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Word Ladder is a word game invented by Lewis Carroll, the author of books such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It was originally known as a "doublet".

Contents

[edit] Rules

The player is given a start word and an end word. In order to win the game, the player must change the start word into the end word progressively, creating an existing word at each step. To do so, the player can do one of the following on each step.

  • Add a letter
  • Remove a letter
  • Change a letter
  • Use the same letters in different order (an anagram)

[edit] Example

In this example, the player is given the start word peaks and the end word roman.

peaks     
speak     (different letter order)
peak      (removed a letter)
peat      (changed a letter)
meat      (changed a letter)
mat       (removed a letter)
man       (changed a letter)
mane      (added a letter)
mine      (changed a letter)
miner     (added a letter)
minor     (changed a letter)
manor     (changed a letter)
roman     (different letter order)

[edit] Process

Usually, the best and quickest way to change one word into another is to simplify the start word into a three-letter word (there are many in the English language), change that three-letter word into a word that suits the needs of the player and then build on it until the end word is achieved.

[edit] Others

Generally, some scoring system is used to favour few-word transitions over many-word transitions, so a word ladder with fewer words gets more points than one with a lot of them, provided they have the same start and end words.

Some other versions of the games only allow letters to be changed (that is, no adding or removing letters or changing letter order—this version has been called word golf) or demand that the end word has some kind of relationship with the start word (synonymous, antonymous, semantic...). This was also the way the game was originally devised by Lewis Carroll when it first appeared in Vanity Fair. [1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ [1] Gutenberg project article

[edit] External links

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