serial changes

I like to play around with words, not with their meanings but with their physical properties. The result is the puzzles that I post here from time to time. I recently set myself the challenge of finding a word in which the first letter can be changed to form another valid English word, then the second letter and so on, at each stage forming a valid word.

This is how this process might work for a four-letter word:

CORE…PORE…PARE…PALE…PALM

However, finding a solution involving five-letter words is much harder. To date, I’ve found five solutions, although I imagine that there are many more. Can you find one?

Incidentally, I’ve tried to find a solution for six-letter words, so far without success. Can you?

matching pairs

The four words in the top row of the following grid have different variants of the same ‘property’:

On that basis, place the following four words in the four empty cells in the grid so that each word is directly below a word that has the same variant of the unknown property:

ASPECT EFFECT REJECT SELECT

There are 4! (=24) ways in which these four words can be arranged, only one of which is correct. The fact that both groups of four words are in alphabetical order is not relevant to the solution of this puzzle, although the order in which the words in the top row of the grid has been arranged is significant.

connecting the dots

I don’t usually post puzzles around this time, but I’ve been struggling with writing for the past couple of months, and I thought that this recently devised poser might serve as a welcome distraction from the more serious matters plaguing the world.

*  *  *

What connects the following six words to the Latin word for ‘bread’?

CHAIN LAITY MAIL PANEL PURE RAIN

This is probably quite easy, but I have another, which I will post in the next couple of days, that I believe is much harder.

notice

The past week has felt very strange. Last Tuesday, my faithful old laptop finally gave up the ghost (it was at least ten years old), so for the six days it has taken to purchase a replacement, I’ve felt isolated in a way that I didn’t think possible. Fifty years ago, I spent days on end on my own in the heart of the Australian Outback, hundreds of miles from anywhere, without once feeling isolated. This has been different.

I didn’t want to check my Gmail account through Paula’s laptop, because I’d be signing in myself on a new device a few days later, and I was afraid that Google would flag this up as some kind of hacking. It does do that, as I recall from past experience. The second problem was that I don’t remember phone numbers. I keep my friends’ numbers in a Note file on my computer, a file that perished alongside its host. Then there is the coronavirus situation. People may be going about their lives as best they can in the circumstances, but nothing is actually happening. The pubs are shut for a start, and, unfortunately, for a good reason. So ‘social distancing’ really means ‘social shrinkage’.

This is to let regular readers know that only a few new items will be posted on this blog over the next few months as I grapple with a new PC—and the rigours of a new operating system.

However, on the same day that my computer collapsed and died, Paula and I did enjoy a walk along a section of the local river, on which I took some interesting photos. I had planned to write about it that afternoon, but I now hope to complete the project within the next week or so.