Talk:Word ladder

Comments
What is the antecedent of "This" in the following paragraph? "Some other versions of the games only allow letters to be changed (that is, no adding or removing letter or changing letter order—this version has been called word golf) or demand that the end word has some kind of relationship with the start word (synonymical, antonymical, semantic...). This was also the way the game was originally devised by Lewis Carroll when it first appeared in Vanity Fair." Is it the "word golf" version or the relationship version? And what does Vanity Fair have to do with anything? &mdash;JerryFriedman 03:56, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Lewis Carroll has created the game Word Ladder (although there may have been older versions of course), and first published it in Vanity Fair. In his version, the first and last word were related, and only changing one letter at the time (with no changing of the length of the word or of the letter-order) was allowed. I have this info from the Penguin Book "The Complete Lewis Carroll", somwhere near the back (I don't have it available for the moment). This info can be found online, e.g. here: and here:. Although the rule that the two words must be related isn't given here, it is followed in the examples given.

The paragraph can of course be rewritten to make all this clearer... Fram 12:27, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Doublets - the name of this game
This entry should be called 'Doublets' - Lewis Carroll's original name and still widely used. Carroll's rules were that single letters could be changed (to make interim words) but not removed or inserted. Following his article in Vanity Fair (29 March 1879), that magazine ran a weekly Doublets prize competition.

The game has since been reproduced, sometimes with rule variations to allow the insertion, deletion or shuffling of letters,under a variety of names, including: Transformations, Passes, Stepwords, Transitions, Word Chains, Word Ladders, Word Links, Word Ping-Pong, and Word Golf.

My reference (The Oxford Guide to Word Games, by Tony Augarde, which has a whole chapter on 'The Games of Lewis Carroll') includes much more relevant material. But I don't have time to present it nicely now. Earthlyreason 07:24, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Transparent text object unreadable in dark mode
The main image on this article is rendered as a transparent object. This visually puts black text on a black background in dark mode. Suggest making the doublet non-transparent or the text, if renderable, responsive to text color changes by dark modes and dark readers. 71.244.188.67 (talk) 21:39, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Math
Timmy and his family are playing a game his mom has 2 cards and Timmy has 3 how many cards does he. Have. Pot them all to getter good luck 65.191.154.6 (talk) 01:28, 3 April 2024 (UTC)