Comments on: met+a+filter Chain Words and Chain Letters

Question: met+a+filter Chain Words and Chain Letters

snailer — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:17:03 -0800

Is there a name for these kind of words, and what is the longest one?

This is another instance where google is chock full of results for another meaning of this phrase, and it's difficult to find a good relevant answer. I searched for chain words, chain letters etc.

Is there a name for a word that is created by adding a letter onto another word? What is the longest word that exists that each iteration is a valid word? For the sake of argument, it doesn't have to reduce to a valid one letter word.

e.g.

tools=

to + o = too
too + l = tool
tool + s = tools

or ideal

i
i + d = id
id + e = ide (ides of March)
ide + a = idea
idea + l = ideal

I hope that's enough to go on. Apologies if this has been asked and answered previously, I just can't seem to find the answer!

By: dirtynumbangelboy

dirtynumbangelboy — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:29:06 -0800

I think your second example is flawed. I seem to recall 'ides' is not a plural.

hmm

a

a+n = an
an + t = ant
ant + e = ante
ante + s = antes

By: snailer

snailer — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:35:39 -0800

You're right there - ides is not a plural, it's just a name for the 15th of March.

By: ALongDecember

ALongDecember — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:38:38 -0800

An ide is "A cyprinoid fish (Leuciscus idus or Idus melanotus), inhabiting the fresh waters of northern Europe." (OED, thanks university access!)

By: thrako

thrako — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:41:13 -0800

The NPR show Car Talk had a similar puzzle here, (with answer here), but they allow you add letters in the middle of the word

By: snailer

snailer — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:43:18 -0800

Also sort of related, may help find the answer, is the concept of Levenshtein Distance

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:49:22 -0800

Damned if I can remember the/a common name, but this is the meat of a classic parlor game variant—players taking successive turns appending a letter to the word-so-far, losing the round when they can't make a new 1-character-longer word.

By: box

box — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:57:10 -0800

Are you thinking of Ghost, cortex?

By: lampoil

lampoil — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:14:13 -0800

This is kind of the opposite of Ghost.

I remember them playing Ghost with an anonymous hacker on Ghostwriter. Oh, yeah.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:18:29 -0800

Yes, box! Thank you. Plain vanilla Ghost, as described there, is more generous (and so more playable, and less repetitious) than the variant that fits this bill. I was hoping tracking down writeups might get me closer to a proper answer, but no dice so far.

By: jacobm

jacobm — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:39:31 -0800

Thanks for giving me an idea for new programming project for the next time I teach intro programming!

Anyway, "reversist" and "sheathery" are tied for longest word with this property in the dictionary that comes included on my Mac (apparently Webster's Second International, 1934). It looks like lots of the "prefix words" in these two are pretty obscure. If you remove "sheat" and "rever" from the source dictionary, you get a pretty nice word, "buttery", among several other 7-letter words.

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:20:20 -0800

Lampoli: yes! First thing that popped into my head when I read this thread was "But I was going to spell MUSICIAN!" "Yeah, dad, but we spelled MUSIC first."

THABTO is bad

By: kdar

kdar — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:22:08 -0800

The ides of a month is not just for March, btw. It's for all months in the ancient Roman calendar.

By: misterbrandt

misterbrandt — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:38:32 -0800

spate
skate
slanted
skaters (but "kate" may disqualify this one)

on preview, crap, jacobm has some long ones there (heh)

By: rob511

rob511 — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:31:10 -0800

If there's no term for this game, might I suggest catenary cradle?

By: abcde

abcde — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:48:31 -0800

Man, jacobm got to it after I decided to write this up in Python, but before I did it.

By: langeNU

langeNU — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:58:08 -0800

Lampoil - that anonymous hacker was Max Mouse!

By: misterbrandt

misterbrandt — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:18:09 -0800

From my brother:

a
at
ate
late
elate
relate
prelate
prelates

Which is 8.

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:27:05 -0800

misterbrandt: Those words are all in my Mac dictionary. So it appears jacobm's script didn't really work?

jacobm?

By: misterbrandt

misterbrandt — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:20:41 -0800

From my father:

a
as
has
hast
haste
hasten
hastens
chastens

Also 8.

By: jacobm

jacobm — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:24:40 -0800

My program assumes you're only allowed to add to the end of the word, not to the beginning as well, which explains the discrepancy between my and misterbrandt's answers. That seems like a more correct reading to me, but if you go that way, then 'reversis' and 'sheathery' still appear at 9 letters apiece, and if you remove 'rever' and 'sheat' then 'sheathery' still wins (as "at => eat => heat => heath => sheath => sheathe => sheather => sheathery"). If you remove the rather strange word "sheathery" from the dictionary, you get a 21-way tie:

"aspirate"
"blathery"
"cocreate"
"draughts"
"eclipser"
"hyperite"
"laminary"
"ocellary"
"ocreated"
"orangery"
"paradoxy"
"planetal"
"plateaux"
"prestamp"
"prestate"
"sheathed"
"sheather"
"spirated"
"stellary"
"strident"
"thoughty"

Neither of misterbrandt's answers are there; it looks like my /usr/share/dict/words doesn't have any plurals nor does it include many conjugated forms of words, so "prelates", "hastens", "chastens" (and most bizarrely "has") aren't in it. Obviously different dictionaries will produce different results.