On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Richard Schroeppel wrote:
One of my favorite word puzzles is finding "consecutive" words, where the last letter is incremented to make a new word.
CONVEX CONVEY
Hey, that's good, I never would have thought of that!
The problem is to find more examples.
My best: steak -> steal -> steam singler -> singles -> singlet (But Jessica is reading over my shoulder and doesn't like singler.)
The challenges are longer words,
paterfamiliar -> paterfamilias ? If you don't buy that one, how about experimented -> experimentee or the like?
and longer sequences.
I thought for a minute that m-w.com liked all of dub -> duc -> dud -> due but I guess "duc" is French, and is only in Websters because of Le Duc Tho, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger. rob -> roc -> rod -> roe tam -> tan -> tao -> tap if you're a Taoist teak -> teal -> team ----> tear -> teas -> teat, with a bit of a gap.
I'd also like a true wraparound example, with Z incremented to A and the carry propagated to the next letter
cow -> cox -> coy -> coz -> CPA ??? --Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu