Word Ladder - Rules

Rules

The player is given a start word and an end word. In order to win the game, the player must change the start word into the end word progressively, creating an existing word at each step. Each step consists of a single letter substitution. For example, the following are solutions to the word ladder puzzle between words "cold" and "warm".

COLD → CORD → CARD → WARD → WARM

COLD → CORD → CORMWORM → WARM

COLD → WOLD → WORD → WARD → WARM

Often word ladder puzzles are created where the end word has some kind of relationship with the start word (synonymous, antonymous, semantic...). This was also the way the game was originally devised by Lewis Carroll when it first appeared in Vanity Fair.

Variations

Some variations also allow the following changes at each step:

  • Adding a letter
  • Removing a letter
  • Use the same letters in different order (an anagram).

Read more about this topic:  Word Ladder

Famous quotes containing the word rules:

    Children can’t make their own rules and no child is happy without them. The great need of the young is for authority that protects them against the consequences of their own primitive passions and their lack of experience, that provides with guides for everyday behavior and that builds some solid ground they can stand on for the future.
    Leontine Young (20th century)

    If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman’s industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.
    Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)

    The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
    Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974)