Previous posts have looked at the word ‘ladder’ and the various ways in which the word can and has been used in phrases, proverbs and in different contexts.  Have you heard of a ‘word ladder’ though?  A little clue: you can’t climb one in a skirt without taking seven steps…

What’s a word ladder?

A word ladder is a Victorian word play game, which you can now find on the puzzle pages of some newspapers.  The game looks like a ladder drawn flat, so you have the rails and rungs visible (this basically creates a grid).  There is a word in the space at the top, and a word in the space at the bottom, but the spaces in between are empty.  These have to be filled in by the person playing the game, and the aim is to get from the word at the top, to the word at the bottom by changing only one letter at a time.  An example of a word ladder is below:

COLD

CORD

CARD

WARD

WARM

Here, you can get from ‘cold’ to ‘warm’ in four steps.  This is a very good one, because most word ladders use words that are related in some way to form the start and end points of the game.

Where do they come from?

Word ladders are a Victorian game, first appearing in Vanity Fair in March 1879.  They were invented by a man named Charles Dodgson, a mathematician from Cheshire who was also a lecturer at Christ Church college, Oxford until 1898.  Charles Dodgson is much better known for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

Dodgson claimed to have invented word ladders (also called doublets and, later, word golf) on Christmas Day in 1877, mentioning this in his diaries in 1878 where he referred to the game as ‘word links’.  In 1879 he published a series of them (this time called ‘doublets’) in Vanity Fair.

How do they work and what are the rules?

Word ladders generally follow the example above where ‘cold’ becomes ‘warm’ in four steps.  The idea is that only one letter from each word can be changed, and under the strictest rules, it can’t be the same letter from each word that is changed each time (so for instance, you can’t just change the second or third letter of a word each time to make the new words, you have to change a different letter each time).

There are some variations where you have to take away a letter each time, or add a letter each time, or even make a new anagram out of the existing letters to get from the start word to the end word, but these are new changes to the rules, which Charles Dodgson did not invent with the original game.

Dodgson’s original word ladders (or doublets) were given with an instruction, such as ‘make DOOR LOCK’ or ‘obtain LOAN from BANK’, which is where we get the rule about the start and end words being connected from.  You can ‘obtain LOAN from BANK’ in five steps: BANK – BONK – BOOK – LOOK – LOON – LOAN.  Making ‘DOOR LOCK’ only takes four steps: DOOR – BOOR – BOOK – LOOK – LOCK.

Word ladders are usually played with words of four, five or six letters, and there are sometimes clues given for each word (or some of the steps may be filled in to help the player along the way as a seven or eight step ladder can be tricky to solve with no help).  There is often more than one solution to each word ladder, as for some word ladders there are many words with a similar combination of letters.  It can be fun to see how many different solutions there are for easy word ladders.  For example, for the ladder ‘LAST’ to ‘WORD’ some of the possible solutions are:

LAST – LOST – LOSE – LORE – LORD – WORD

LAST – PAST – PART – WART – WORT – WORD

LAST – CAST – CART – CARD – WARD – WORD

LAST – CAST – CART – CARD – CORD – WORD

A nice three letter word ladder is one which takes the player from ‘ape’ to ‘man’; Carroll believed that six steps was the shortest way to follow Charles Darwin’s evolutionary path on a word ladder.  However, a technology developer, named Jon McLoone recently found that only five steps were needed.  Here is McLoone’s evolutionary ladder:

APE – APT – OPT – OAT – MAT – MAN

Dodgson’s version uses six steps:

APE – ARE – ERE – ERR – EAR – MAR – MAN

Both McLoone, Dodgson and a man named Donald Knuth have notably done mathematical work with word ladders, aiming to find the longest word ladders possible (especially for the shortest words).   McLoone used a modern computer program and found that the longest short word ladder was one of 49 steps for a ladder made out of six letter words.  His stipulation was that the start and end words needed to be connected by their meaning, following the rules of Dodgson’s original game.

Knuth found that there are many words which have no ‘neighbours’, that is to say that there are no words which can be made by changing one letter of these ‘aloof’ words.  Knuth called them ‘aloof’ words because they are, and because ‘aloof’ is actually one of them.  Words such as ‘ninth’, ‘earth’ and ‘ocean’ can’t be made into any other real words by changing only one letter.  There are also a few words that can only form a pair, such as ‘odium’ and ‘opium’.  Because of this research we know that there is a finite number of words that can be used to create a word ladder, and this was the basis of McLoone’s research into the longest word ladders possible.

Word ladders about ladders, are there any?

We’ve come up with some ladder word ladders (try saying that quickly!).  Here’s a four step word ladder where the start and end words relate to pruning trees or picking fruit:

LADDER

__________                     Clue: A place where you store food

__________                     Clue: Less soft

__________                     Clue: The processing of firming up

GARDEN

Here’s another where the link between the start and end points is the necessity of being safe when using ladders:

LOFT

______               Clue: Opposite of right

______               Clue: Skillful

DAFT

______               Clue: Projectile used in a pub game

______               Clue: Pulled by a horse

CARE

And finally, a word ladder where the starting word is part of the equipment, and the target word is the thing you need to be if you’re using a ladder:

RUNG

______               Clue: Used as a bottle stopper

______               Clue: A type of bed

______               Clue: Somewhere you keep money

______               Clue: To hesitate

______               Clue: Speaking

TALL

Answers are at the bottom of this post (no scrolling down until you have completed them!).

Back to the first paragraph…

At the start of this post there was a cryptic message about not being able to climb a word ladder in a skirt without taking seven steps.  Well, all is explained:

CLIMB

CLIME

CHIME

CHINE

SHINE

SHIRE

SHIRT

SKIRT

Now do you see why you can’t climb a word ladder in a skirt without taking those seven important steps?

Here are the answers for the word ladder puzzles:

LADDER – LARDER – HARDER – HARDEN – GARDEN

LOFT – LEFT – DEFT – DAFT – DART – CART – CARE

RUNG – BUNG – BUNK – BANK – BALK – TALK – TALL