Doublets

Lewis Carroll, the Englishman best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other children’s stories, was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, January 27, 1832. He was also a prolific puzzle creator, most of them based on math and logic. One exception was his doublets – the process of changing one word into another by changing one letter at a time to form a new word until the transformation is complete. For example, to turn “less” into “more,” you would write “less, loss, lose, lore, more.” Brain Aerobics Weekly features doublets periodically, and you can find more online by doing a web search of doublets, word ladders, stepwords, and word chains.

Alternatively, you can make up your own doublets by starting with a simple word like “fish,” “hand” or “head,” and seeing how many new words you can make by changing one letter at a time. It’s fairly easy to turn them into “carp,” “foot” and “tail,” but try to keep the chain going as long as you can.