In honor of Lewis Carroll’s 180th birthday tomorrow, I’ve created a single-sheet booklet featuring a stellar word game that he invented called Doublets. It’s fun, it’s fiendish, it’s addictive.
Doublets involves transforming a given word into another by changing one letter at a time, making a real word at each link in the chain. The illustration to the left, by Gregory Nemec, offers a witty example, showing how an APE evolves into MAN, with four links in the chain:
ape–apt–opt–oat–mat–man.
Hundreds of other such transformations are possible, and the booklet pictured below features six: MORE-LESS, COLD-WARM, HEAD-TAIL, PIG-STY, HAND-FOOT, and WET-DRY. To make the booklet, print this PDF double-sided on letter paper and fold into a basic accordion following the directions for Book #1 in this instruction sheet. (Try not to peek at the answers—printed in tiny, tiny type—on the concealed part of the booklet.)
A Google search will yield lots of sites with other doublets for kids (and adults) to solve. At this link you can read both Carroll’s article in the March 1879 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, in which he introduced the game, as well as the text of the book, Doublets: A Word-Puzzle, that he published later that year. Martin Gardner’s article, Word Ladders: Lewis Carroll’s Doublets, is a good overview. It appeared in the November 1994 issue of Math Horizons and is the source of the illustration reproduced above and in the single-sheet booklet.
Gregory Nemec’s illustration is reproduced here with the permission of the artist.
I have a big boxful of bookmaking goodies for Valentine’s Day—hot pink card stock (prefolded!), big red construction-
