A Word Stair Contest

Authors

Roger Hannahs

Abstract

A sequence of letters forms a word stair if each set of n consecutive letters in it forms a word: for example, a 16-space word stair of three letter words is WASHERAYETAGEMUD (was, ash, she, ... , emu, mud) from the May 1970 Kickshaws. In its May/June 1978 issue, the magazine Games sponsored a contest based on a generalization of the word stair. It allowed words of any length and any degree of overlap to be formed out of the letter sequence: for example, a 12-space generalized word stair is WORDUPSTAIRS (word, dups, upstair, stairs). More specifically, the contst objective was to construct a 20-space generalized word stair out of words taken from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, Third Edition, the winning entry being the one with the greatest total of letters in the words used.

Recommended Citation

Hannahs, Roger (1979) "A Word Stair Contest," Word Ways: Vol. 12 : Iss. 1 , Article 10.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol12/iss1/10