Complementary Letters and Words

Authors

Rex Gooch

Abstract

In "Complementary Letters" in the November 2001 Word Ways, Anil defines complementary letters as those whose ordinal places in the alphabet add to 27, e.g., A and Z, or L and O. He asks for words and phrases composed solely of such pairs, giving EVOLVE as an example, and asking whether LOVERISH is a word (I cannot find it). Such words must be even length, say 2n, and have n pairs of letters. My findings are presented below. As can be seen, such words are scarce. An asterisk denotes words that have this property in extremis: every one of the (n-1) pairs of letters 1 and 2, 2 and 3, etc., is complementary. That clearly requires the same two letters to alternate.

Recommended Citation

Gooch, Rex (2002) "Complementary Letters and Words," Word Ways: Vol. 35 : Iss. 1 , Article 21.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol35/iss1/21