A Clever and Amusing Word Game

from the 1911 Book of Knowledge: The Children's Encyclopedia (Grolier)
page 2970

The game of doublets is an interesting word game that gives plenty of scope for skill and ingenuity, and enables us to exercise our memories and to make good use of our knowledge of words. Two words are chosen, each containing the same number of letters, and the words should be either of quite opposite meaning, as wrong and right, black and white, good and evil, rise and fall, and so on, or they should stand for things quite different from one another, as wood and iron, butter and cheese, soap and grease.

The game is to change one word into the other by changing only one letter at a time, and making a chain of words between the doublets. Two or three examples will make the method clear.

black
slack
stack
stalk
stale
shale
whale
while
white



tame
time
tile
wile
wild


shoe
shot
soot
boot


beef
been
bean
beak
peak
perk
pork


cat
cot
dot
dog


more
lore
lose
loss
less


black
block
clock
click
chick
chink
chine
whine
white


It will be seen by these examples that only one letter is altered in each word to make the next, and every change makes an actual dictionary word. It is not allowable to make a change of a letter that will produce something that is not a real word. For instance, we might have changed beef into pork like this: beef, boef, boek, bork, pork. That, of course, would be wrong, as no such words as boef, boek, bork, exist.

Then the transformation from one word to the other must be made with as few changes as possible. In changing from black to white we might have proceeded like this: black, block, clock, click, chick, thick, think, thine whine, white; but here we make eight words in between, and not more than seven are needed.

It must, of course, be understood that in changing one letter to make a new word in the chain, the substituted letter must occupy exactly the same position in the new word that the discarded letter did in the old word. Thus we can change bean into bran, but not into barn, for e being the second letter in bean, r must be the second letter in the new word, as it is in bran.