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:
H |
E |
A |
D |
H |
E |
A |
L |
T |
E |
A |
L |
T |
E |
L |
L |
T |
A |
L |
L |
T |
A |
I |
L |
Thus, the word HEAD is changed into TAIL with five
successive transformations. Try some of our Doublet
puzzles involving the words:
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