In Word Ways in August and November 2002, he published several squares found in this wordlist. The largest source was the United States Board on Geographic Names National Imagery and Mapping Agency. His continuing work produced one of the best of this genre, making use of "impolarity" (found on the Internet) and the plural of "Tony Nader" (found in the white pages), as well as words verified in more traditional references:īy combining common first and last names and verifying the results in white-pages listings, Steve Root of Westboro, Massachusetts, was able to document the existence of all ten names below (total number of people found is listed after each line):Īround 2000, Rex Gooch of Letchworth, England, analyzed available wordlists and computing requirements and compiled one or two hundred specialized dictionaries and indexes to provide a reasonably strong vocabulary. If two words could be found containing the patterns "SCENOOTL" and "HYETNNHY", this would become a complete ten-square.įrom the 1970s, Jeff Grant had a long history of producing well-built squares concentrating on the ten-square from 1982 to 1985, he produced the first three traditional ten-squares by relying on reasonable coinages such as "Sol Springs" (various extant people named Sol Spring) and "ses tunnels" (French for "its tunnels"). In 1976, Frank Rubin produced an incomplete ten-square containing two nonsense phrases at the top and eight dictionary words. However, "word researchers have always regarded the tautonymic ten-square as an unsatisfactory solution to the problem." 80% solution
Darryl Francis and Dmitri Borgmann succeeded in using near-tautonyms (second- and third-order reduplication) to employ seven different entries by pairing " orangutang" with "urangutang" and "ranga-ranga" with "tanga-tanga", as follows: O R A N G U T A N G Each such square contains five words appearing twice, which in effect constitutes four identical 5-squares. Since 1921, 10-squares have been constructed from reduplicated words and phrases like "Alala! Alala!" (a reduplicated Greek interjection). Various methods have produced partial results to the 10-square problem: It has been called the Holy Grail of logology. The following is one of several "perfect" nine-squares in English (all words in major dictionaries, uncapitalized, and unpunctuated): A C H A L A S I AĪ 10-square is naturally much harder to find, and a "perfect" 10-square in English has been hunted since 1897. Here are examples of English word squares up to order eight: However, equally large English-language squares consisting of arbitrary phrases containing dictionary words are relatively easy to construct they too are not considered true word squares, but they have been published in The Enigma and other puzzle magazines as "Something Different" squares.Ī specimen of the order-six square (or 6-square) was first published in English in 1859 the 7-square in 1877 the 8-square in 1884 and the 9-square in 1897. Modern research indicates that a 12-square would be essentially impossible to construct from indexed words and phrases, even using a large number of languages. No source or explanation is given for any of the "words", so this square does not meet the standards for legitimate word squares.
This is square 7 of Chapter IX of the Third Book, which is full of incomplete and complete "squares". The following 12×12 array of letters appears in a Hebrew manuscript of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage of 1458, said to have been "given by God, and bequeathed by Abraham".
If the "words" in a word square need not be true words, arbitrarily large squares of pronounceable combinations can be constructed. Thus the square consists of a palindrome ("tenet"), a reversal ("sator" and "rotas"), and a word ("opera") which can be reversed into a passably coined name ("Arepo"). However, the word "Arepo" appears nowhere else in Latin literature most of those who have studied the Sator Square agree that it is to be taken as a proper name, either an adaptation of a non-Latin word or, more likely, a name invented specifically for this sentence. In addition to satisfying the basic properties of word squares, the Sator Square spread widely due to several other attributes: it is palindromic it can be read as a sentence of obscure meaning and additional meaning such as reference to the Christian Paternoster prayer can be derived from its letters.
The Sator Square is a famous word square in Latin. Sator Square in Corinium ( Cirencester), England Sator Square