SURPRISING RESULT

I was, I must admit, a tad surprised that none of my readers - especially Gill and others who are good at word puzzles - made any attempt at solving the last puzzle posed on this blog...

In fact, I was actually wondering whether it was worth the bother of blogging the answer and then I thought: "Yes! I will! Because (a) history demands it, and (b) I haven't got anything else to blog about today!"

So, the puzzle was...

Find a nine-letter English word from which you can remove ONE LETTER at a time and always leave another NEW WORD.

And that word was---

STARTLING

And these are the words within the word---

STARTLING - STARTING
STARTING - STARING
STARING - STRING
STRING - STING
STING - SING
SING - SIN
SIN - IN
IN - I

Maybe I should set an easier puzzle, such as one of Lewis Carroll's Doublets, a game which the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass devised at Christmas 1877 in order to entertain two young ladies - Julia and Ethel - with "nothing to do"!

Originally Lewis Carroll - or, as doubtless Julia and Ethel knew him, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - called his game Word Links and players were required to connect two "doublets" (words with the same number of letters, usually 3, 4 or 5) using linking-words each of which would differ from the preceding word by a single letter only and without any of the letters within the words being rearranged.

The winner of the game is the first player to achieve the transformation using the fewest number of links.

For example, as Lewis Carroll - himself the great panjandrum of topsyturveydom - showed, it was possible to turn HEAD to TAIL thus...

H E A D
H E A L
T E A L
T E L L
T A L L
T A I L

Carroll's game was taken up by the magazine Vanity Fair in 1879 under the name Doublets and, for a while, became something of a parlour sensation - the Victorian equivalent of Sudoku - with regular competitions and the inevitable arguments about whether or not words were permissible as links!

Lewis Carroll published a couple of pamphlets about the game and even compiled a glossary of 1,400 three- to six-letter admissable words. Later permutations on the game (usually without any acknowledgement to Lewis Carroll) have been known bu such names as Word Chains, Word Ladders and Stepwords.

If you care to try your hand at Doublets, you could have a go at...

Putting MILK into PAIL

Turning WHEAT into BREAD

Making FIRE produce HEAT

Using BREAD to make TOAST

In all cases, players should follow Lewis Carroll's original instruction: "It is, perhaps, needless to state that it is de rigueur that the links should be English words, such as might be used in good society."

Of course you won't need them (or won't want them) but I'll blog the answers after Easter...