Doublets

    The word game "Doublet" was invented by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), the author of children's classics "Alice in Wonderland", Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, who was known to his fellow mathematicians as Charles L. Dodgson.  Aside from children's classics, he had also written a number mathematics books.

    The game Doublets is also known by other names such as Word Chains, Word Ladders, and Stepwords.   After its first appearance in the magazine Vanity Fair, it became a popular word game.  This game is a word transformation puzzle.  As mentioned by Lewis Carroll himself, the rules of the puzzle are simple.  Two words of similar length are given.  The objective is to transform the first word into the second word by forming successive words of the same length having changing only one letter at a time.  The greater challenge is to do the transformation in the least number of words.  This word game became a favorite when the magazine Vanity Fair ran a contest of the Game of Doublets.  An example given by Lewis Carroll himself is transforming the word HEAD to TAIL.  This can be done by the following succession of transformations:

Thus, the word HEAD is changed into TAIL with five successive transformations.

Try some of our Doublet puzzles involving the words:

Lewis Carroll's Corner