Word Challenge

davee123

So, for whatever reason, I got to thinking. Let's suppose you have a 4 letter word, say "tile". You change one letter to make a new word, "mile", and then again to "mild", and then "mold", etc. How many iterations would you need in order to use *every* letter of the alphabet (in the above I've used only D,E,I,L,M,O, and T), without repeating a word twice?

It took me 32 words to achieve this, and theoretically, it's possible within only 23 words. I'm sure someone can do better. Anyone?

DaveE

AKG

Many
Manx
Mane
Maze
Haze
Have
Wave
Wake
Woke
Joke
Poke
Pore
Gore
Bore
Core
Cure
Curl
Furl
Fuel
Duel
Duet
Suet
Suit
Quit

TOTAL: 24
Note: Obviously, this is 1 worse than the theoretical best. In particular, the letter "e" is repeated. It first appears in MANE then disappears after CURE, only to reappear three words later in FUEL and then disappear after SUET.

davee123

Very nice!

I actually couldn't resist the urge, and fed it into a program, which was able to find a whole bunch of solutions using 23 words. Of course, the word list I used included some words that weren't fit for posting (go figure that it tried to use one of them a *lot*), so using a tamer word list, I got:

quiz
quip
quid
quit
suit
skit
skim
swim
shim
shiv
shin
chin
coin
join
loin
loan
lorn
lore
lobe
loge
logy
fogy
foxy

(All words were found in the Scrabble online dictionary, so I'm calling it good!)

DaveE

coffee na lang dear

I don't know if this is correct, but let me try it...here's my list:

rope
robe
rode
role
rose
rote
dote
dole
dome
done
dope
dose
doze
daze
faze
gaze
laze
maze
raze
race
rage
rake
rape
rare
rate
rite
bite
cite
kite
mite
site
side
sire
lire
dire
fire
hire
sire
tire
wire
were
here
mere

Total: 43

AKG

The idea is to make a list of size 23, but use all the letters. Right away, I see you don't need "mere" at the end, since all it does is introduce an "m", which you've already done when you had "dome". You also use "sire" twice, and the second time is entirely unnecessary (you don't need it to go from "hire" to "tire") so you can get rid of that. On the other hand, you don't appear to have used the letters 'y' and 'x', so it's not even complete yet.