Has anyone ever made a word square?

[scratch123]

is
to

Word squares are like magic squares except instead of adding up numbers you add up letters to create a word. All of the columns and rows form a word. According to wikipedia the record for the largest word square is 10x10. The one above is one that I made but it is only 2x2. See if you can make one.

[gaurwraith]

sea
aye
pet


the last column is from down up, though

[ATrueCanadianBrit]

Darn, that's hard...

in
to

Is all I could come up with, but I'm not thinking too hard as my Android just got updated to have multi-touch!!!

[Grop]

Captain obvious : every one-letter word would make a square, such as a or I.

[Microscopic cog]

D A T A
A D O R
F A K E
T R E S

Words; Daft, Adar, Toke, Ares, Data, Ador, Fake, Tres

Just three really questionable words!

[jaap]

Just three really questionable words!

Here's mine:

S T O P
P A V E
I D E A
T A R T

The only questionable one here is "Tada!". It tends to be hyphenated in dictionaries.

[scratch123]

How long did it take you guys to make those 4 letter word squares? Did you use a computer at all to help you?

[TaintedDeity]

In the one in the OP, is 'ti' a word?

[Iulus Cofield]

Not anymore than tfad is.

[TaintedDeity]

Are these word squares only meant to make sense in two directions, then?

[Iulus Cofield]

Yeah, I like the palindromic ones better, but they are also a lot harder and a lot less fun.

[gaurwraith]

I think it's from left to right and from up to down, thus mine is not correct. (though the Op said "All of the columns and rows form a word")

[Microscopic cog]

Completely forgot from down to up and right to left. /facepalm

I'll try again when I've got more time.

Edit: Also forgot diagonal words. /bigger facepalm

[scratch123]

I guess I should have said earlier that they don't have to be palindromic. Left to right and top to bottom is fine.

Since you guys did such a good job creating word squares here are some other square ideas. I haven't found anything written about them anywhere so to my knowledge these are completely new. Here they are:

Syllable word square:

Instead of having each section of the square be a letter each section is a syllable of a word instead. Just like in regular word squares when you combine the syllables left/right and top/bottom it should form a word. A variation of this would be instead of focusing on spelling focus more on how the words and syllables sound. For example the word seagull sounds like the fictional words seegull, segull, and cegull.

Sentence word squares:

Instead of each section of the square being a letter or syllable, each section is a word instead. When read left/right and top/bottom these words should form a grammatically correct sentence.


These are much harder to make than regular word squares. So far I haven't been able to make any but hopefully someone here can make one.

[Microscopic cog]

Relevant: Lewis Carroll's square poem-thingy:

[scratch123]

"I would her will be pitied" doesn't seem like its a grammatically correct sentence. Other than that that sentence square is pretty impressive. Do you have any more?

[Microscopic cog]

Uuh, googling gave me the following answer which seems right:

Well, first of all, Lewis Carroll's poems are often overanalyzed. He wrote nonsense poems. He just liked to snap words together to sound nice. Which they did!

Now, I would her will be pitied. Would = wish. Will = what the girl wanted. Pitied = considered, accommodated. He's saying "I hope the girl gets whatever it is she wants."

Then in the next line he does a kind of play on words. The word 'pity' here has two meanings, one meaning that she feels sorry for him, the other is that she 'wants' him, the same meaning as the previous line. "I wanted her to have what she wanted, and whaddya know? She wanted me!"

So that's an explaination. And I found another poem by Lise McCool, of which the first words of every sentence make up the first sentence of the poem and the same goes for the last words with the last sentence. ( Title excluded ) Not really impressive but kind of neat anyway. There don't seem to be any others as complicated as Lewis Carroll's.

The Farmer's Mother To His Wife

What man fights a birth? Your
man suckled hard at the breast.
Fights saved for plows and more:
a furrowed hope to be blessed.
Birth like God's corn: sons for
your breast, more blessed for harvest.

[DavidSpencer]

Code: Select all

T E S T
A G A R
L A N E
E D G E


[scarecrovv]

Code: Select all

I     ate  a    crow today
ate   my   sock he   did
a     sock once said I
crow  he   said I    eat
today did  I    eat  pants

With some clever punctuation and questionable archaic grammar, that works.

I ate a crow today.
Ate my sock, he did!
"A sock!" once said I.
"Crow" he said I eat.
Today did I eat pants?

I'd say half credit on that one.

[Dustyskulls]

S.O.L.E
O.V.A.L
D.E.S.K
A.N.T.S

Does "Elks" count as a word? It shows up on dictionary.com, so that's at least half the battle won.

If someone can do a 5 x 5, that would be pretty impressive

Also, would this forum allow rectangles?

[The Mighty Thesaurus]

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

[Iulus Cofield]

Thanks, Wikipedia.

[curiosity]

As a child I played a video game called "Dr. Brain" that had a bunch of different thinking puzzles. I remember that one of them was to rearrange letters to create word squares - I think it went up to 6x6.

[Goplat]

PEP
EYE
PEP

4 axes of symmetry. It doesn't get any better than that

[DavidSpencer]

It doesn't get any better than that

I propose the following word square:

I

[RebeccaRGB]

It doesn't get any better than that

I propose the following word square:

I

That would be the I-dentity word square.

[averagebuffoon]

s l a b
c a m e
a c e s
b e n t

and also

c l a s p
l a b o r
a b a c a
s o c a s
p r a s e
I made this one a few weeks ago

[Eebster the Great]

Is "socas" a word?

[mathmannix]

EAT
ATE
TEA

GAG
AGA
GAG

[PM 2Ring]

I discovered EAT ATE TEA in the early 1970s. Notice that you can extend it to a cube. And a tesseract. Etc.

I've done lots of 3, 4 & 5 letter word squares, and I can still do 3 letter ones from the 1st word almost instantly, but I must admit I haven't done many manually since I wrote C code to generate word squares and cubes. But here's one of my favourites that I made manually in the early 1980s.

Code: Select all

GIFT
IDEA
FERN
TANK


[tomandlu]

Here's mine after 20 mins arsing around...

Code: Select all

l a d s
a c r e
t i e r
e d g e


[tonyz]

PEP
EYE
PEP