Talk:Acrostic (puzzle)

Since this is supposed to be an article on acrostics, doesn't it make sense to mention Charles Duerr as well as the others? He wrote two series (around forty books) of crostics for Simon and Schuster..and certainly they sold well enough. What's the problem here? Frankly I'm getting annoyed at the way Wikipedia ignores reasonable changes made in the articles.Don't say this is the encyclopedia that readers can edit when the editing is ignored.oldcitycat 15:30, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm a little curious what you're expecting to happen. If you want to add more information to the article, then just add the information. That's what the "everyone can edit" bit means. --71.197.67.138 02:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Other puzzles with similar names
Interesting to note that by 1908 double acrostic puzzles were supposedly already popular, T.P's Weekly saying:

"By far the most interesting and intellectual form of mental puzzle, however, and a very popular one at the present time, is the Double Acrostic. To be successful in this pastime the would-be solver has to be surrounded by a library of books of reference of all kinds through which he has to search assiduously for a difficult light, and in so doing considerably enlarges his knowledge in many branches of learning—historical, literary, and scientific—and he has often to hunt through poet after poet to find some obscure quotation or allusion."

—Preceding unsigned comment added by User:Shmup (talk) 9 August 2020

The "Double Acrostic" referred to in that article is a different puzzle type. As it explains, it's a list of clues to words where the first letters spell one word and the last letters spell another word (i.e., two acrostics in one). ---Vroo (talk)

hi
hi people hope you have a good time —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.159.116.113 (talk) 18:49, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Unencyclopedic names removed
This article should only have the names of people who created something new or otherwise were especially notable. WP:BIO reads: "that is "significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded." Notable in the sense of being "famous", or "popular" - although not irrelevant - is secondary."

Most of these names are not significant, unusual, or famous. They aren't interesting to a general reader -- certainly not without additional facts.

Consider that not everyone who ever wrote any kind of puzzle for a newpapser or magazine or Web page should be in an encyclopedia. Probably the only name that needs to appear in the article is the inventor's. Think "Encyclopedia Britiannica".

24.130.9.210 (talk) 09:06, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

No, let's not "think EB" -- WP:NOTPAPER. If we routinely omit what isn't interesting to the "general reader", there won't be much left. Elphion (talk) 18:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

OP book prices
I've removed the sentence "His out-of-print books now sell for $300 and more." Market prices are inherently unstable and there's no particular reason to cite them in the article. 850 C (talk) 20:06, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Wrong article title?
I found these interesting definitions at Merriam-Webster online: acrostic 1 : a composition usually in verse in which sets of letters (such as the initial or final letters of the lines) taken in order form a word or phrase or a regular sequence of letters of the alphabet (I vaguely remember reading the word "acrostic" describing a verse of which the first letters of each line spelled a word or name. Lewis Carroll wrote such a verse for Through the Looking Glass.)  By contrast, "Double-Crostic : a puzzle whose object is to fill in with words guessed from definitions a column of numbered dashes and then copy each letter in the correspondingly numbered square of a diagram so that words in the diagram form a quotation and the initial letters of the words in the column spell the author and title from which the quotation is taken —formerly a U.S. registered trademark" Based on these definitions, according to which "acrostic" is a more general word not synonymous with "double-crostic", and the fact that the original name was "double-crostic", I propose that this WP article should be moved to "Double-Crostic" or "Double-crostic". Zaslav (talk) 19:49, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

I agree completely - was very confused by the use of the word "acrostic" here, which I have only ever heard used to refer to the practice of taking the first letters of words/line beginnings to spell a word. The "double"-crostic is not only the term used by the original inventor of this puzzle, but also much more descriptive of its mechanic, which concerns the duality between the clued words and the completely unclued phrase. tanoshimi