Howard W. Bergerson devised these:
As in a word square, the “columns” in each sum are identical with the “rows.”
12/07/2021 UPDATE: Reader James Foster finds that 20 such squares are possible. (Thanks, James.)
Search Results for: in a word
Footloose
A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:
He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.
For Short
In 2007 I posted this cryptic verse by William Whewell:
U 0 a 0 but I 0 U,
O 0 no 0 but O 0 me;
O let not my 0 a 0 go,
But give 0 0 I 0 U so.
You sigh for a cipher but I sigh for you,
O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me;
O let not my sigh for a cipher go,
But give sigh for sigh, for I sigh for you so.
In An Almanac of Words at Play (1975), Willard R. Espy offered this addition. What does it say?
Oy OO thO he O
2 On an OO. OO bO
An OO but he never thO
He’d O the OO dealer O
For the OO OO bO.
Say, has OO’s OO brO
OO O that OO sO?
OO’s OO’s good for nO.
Double Duty
J.A. Lindon composed this remarkable pair of monosyllabic poems in 1969. The two read the same, but each has its own rhyme scheme, and each is a distinct acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out the title.
Cats, Cats, Cats, Cats!
Cats come with mews,
All have sharp claws,
They air their views.
Stray soon from laws,
Climb wall. Each tom
And each mog — grand
Thieves — munch meal from
Scamp’s lunch. Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might
Aim at a rout,
Touch mogs and bite
Such prime bits out!
Chance came. Grey dawn.
At once left mat.
The deuce! On lawn -
Scamp loose — no cat!
Chase ’em, Scamp, Go On!
Cats come with mews, all
Have sharp claws, they
Air their views, stray
Soon from laws, climb wall.
Each tom and
Each mog — grand thieves — munch
Meal from Scamp’s lunch.
Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might aim
At a rout, touch
Mogs and bite such
Prime bits out. Chance came.
Grey dawn. At
Once left mat. The deuce!
On lawn — Scamp loose -
No cat!
(J.A. Lindon and Walter Shedlofsky, “Convertible Acrostics,” Word Ways 2:3 [August 1969], 159-161.)
Roundabout
Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:
What is a Tingle-Airey?
A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.
What are Piddocks?
Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.
What is a Breastsummer?
A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.
What is a Gazebo?
A gazebo is a round balcony with large windows looking out on a view, often of ornamental gardens and cotoneasters.
What is a Cotoneaster?
A cotoneaster is a kind of flowering shrub, a favorite of mumruffins.
What is a Mumruffin?
A mumruffin is a long-tailed tit which often visits bird tables in winter for its share of pobbies.
What are Pobbies?
Pobbies are small pieces of bread thrumbled up with milk and fed to birds and baby animals.
What is Thrumbled?
Thrumbled is squashed together. Ants thrumble round a piece of bread, and crowds in streets thrumble round gongoozlers.
What is a Gongoozler?
A gongoozler is an idle person who is always stopping in the street and staring at a curious object like a tingle-airey.
Once you’ve traversed the list twice or thrice, he says, “you will be able to use them whenever you wish.”
End to End
Read word by word, this sentence is a palindrome:
Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.
From a New Statesman competition:
Women understand men; few men understand women.
God knows man. What is doubtful is what man knows God.
Does milk machinery milk does?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.
08/22/2026 UPDATE: From Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo:
Smile, wavering wings,
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore.
Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while,
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.
(“I don’t git it.” “That’s the clever part. It’s gotta be read backward.”)
(Thanks, David.)
Around the World
A brainteaser from the British intelligence agency GCHQ:
Explain the following: falkun, home de guerra, kick, lavoro, moed, mosca, raccordement, schafer, stobhach, tre, zevk.
The Europa Redux Manuscript
In 2020 Brooklyn’s Honey & Wax Bookseller came into possession of a strange manuscript consisting of 7,000 illustrations, each 3 centimeters square. The images fill 106 loose sheets that often mimic European tourist brochures, and most bear captions that resemble no known language. The manuscript appears to have been created in Switzerland in the 1940s, but no one knows who created it or why. Notre Dame historian of science Robert Goulding wrote, “The fact that [the words] don’t seem to conform to any language or phonemes in any language is suspicious … suggesting to me that they are either a cipher, or there is some method or algorithm used to generate the words.”
In Short
A letter from the king’s minister of finance to Zenon of Kaunos, a public official in Ptolemaic Egypt, 256 B.C.:
Apollonius to Zenon, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.
In The Complete Plain Words, his 1948 style guide for the British civil service, Sir Ernest Gowers calls this a model of concision.
A Wide Net
Entries in the index of Charles Cotton’s 1685 translation of Montaigne’s essays:
Ancient History how far respectable
Ants Conference
Arts taught to Men by other Animals
Books, immortal Children
Chearfulness Sign of Wisdom
Chewing accounted unbecoming
Clothes unknown to many Nations
Compositions that smell of Oil and the Lamp
Convenience, none without Inconvenience
Counsel’s Strength consists in Time
Desire of gathering Riches has no Limits
Dowry, great, Ruin of Families
Dying for Fear of Death
Elephant, discovering the Cheat of his Keeper
Feet performing the Service of Hands
Fortune often coincides with Reason
Foxes judging of the Thickness of the Ice by hearing
Goats trained up to give suck to Children
Greyhound’s Imagination
Head uncovered in the Presence of the Gods, why
Hedgehogs Foreknowledge of the Wind
Hospitals for Beasts
Kings and Coblers Souls cast in the same Mold
Lice cracked with the Teeth
Life, many Ways to get rid of it
Magpie that imitated the Trumpet
Monsters, whether there are such properly
Nations that sleep and wake by Half Years
Nobility, what
Opinion gives Weight and Value to Things
Parchment Scrolls tied about the Neck of Pericles
Parents dead Bodies eaten by their Children
Pedants despised
Pleasures wheedle and caress only to strangle us
Poverty obstinate
Prince ought to be himself in the Field
Revenge against inanimate Creatures
Skin of a Man, sufficient Proof against Weather
Trees buried in Winter
Utility, public, too dearly purchased
Women are more learned than Men in Love’s Business
Word of Men, their only Tye on one another
World a Looking-Glass and Book
The full index (in three volumes) is here, here, and here. It was added after Cotton’s death; I’m not sure who composed it.