Adding (or altering) a letter to get a different word is one of the oldest wordplay tricks, so it’s inspired a few variations that just didn’t fit into the Ubercross M. One of these is similarly “monumental”: it’s a word pyramid.
To get a word pyramid, you start with a single letter (any letter will do as all twenty-six letters are dictionary words). Then you add a letter to get another word, add another to that to get another word, and so on.
Some word pyramids are “rigid,” meaning that the order of letters remains unchanged. I developed one of these for a set of creepy puzzles I developed some years back. While only a few of the words in it were innately scary, all of them could be nudged that way if you think about them through a horror-movie lens:
I
IN
SIN
SING
STING
STRING
STARING
STARTING
STARTLING
Other word pyramids are “shuffling,” allowing the letters to shift between additions. I couldn’t build a good word pyramid for “pyramid” in the rigid format. (Maybe using really uncommon words would get me there, but that wouldn’t meet my definition of a good pyramid.) But I can in the shuffling format:
A
AY
RAY
AIRY
DIARY
MYRIAD
PYRAMID
Here’s another example from Redhead64:
In a rigid word pyramid, you add a letter, leaving all other letters as they are, and get a new word. In a word ladder, you change a letter, leaving all other letters as they are, and get a new word. Word ladders are generally rigid by default; I’ve only seen one source that gave them the option to shuffle.
(The “word ladder” has many other names, but we’ll settle on its semi-official one.)
Word ladders are less visually interesting than their growth-based counterparts, but they have an impressive lineage, having been originally created by Lewis Carroll. You know, the Alice in Wonderland guy?
Carroll originally thought of this as a two-player game, with players competing to see who could turn word X into word Y in the fewest turns. Word X and word Y should not share any letters in the same spaces, and bonus points are allotted if the two words are opposites: WARM into COOL or COLD, for instance, or HEAD into TAIL. (Carroll did the latter in an issue of Vanity Fair.)
So Carroll preferred the short ladders. But, being me, I couldn’t help but wonder about the long ones.
Tomorrow: recognizing one word record…and setting a new one!