Five-letter Word Ladders
Donald Knuth used a computer to study word ladders of five-letter words. He believed that three-letter word ladders were too easy (although Lewis Carroll found six steps were required for APE to evolve into MAN), and that six-letter word ladders were less interesting, since relatively few pairs of six-letter words could be connected with a word ladder. He used a fixed collection of 5,757 of the most common English five-letter words, excluding proper nouns. He determined exactly when two words of the collection had a word ladder between them via other words in the collection. Knuth found that most words were connected to each other, and he also found that 671 words of the collection did not form a word ladder with any other words. He called these words "aloof", because "aloof" is itself an example of such a word.
Read more about this topic: Word Ladder
Famous quotes containing the word word:
“I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside
now take my word for jewel in the open light.”
—Audre Lorde (b. 1934)