Word ladder facts for kids

A Word Ladder is a fun word game where you change one word into another by changing just one letter at a time. Each step you take must create a real word! This clever puzzle was invented by the famous writer Lewis Carroll, who also wrote Alice in Wonderland. You might also hear it called Doublets, word-links, or word golf.

How to Play Word Ladder

To play a word ladder, you are given two words: a starting word and an ending word. Your goal is to transform the starting word into the ending word. You do this by changing only one letter in the word at each step. Every word you create along the way must be a real word found in a dictionary.

For example, let's try to change the word "COLD" into "WARM". Here's one way to do it:

COLD → CORD → CARD → WARD → WARM

This shows how you can get from "COLD" to "WARM" in just four steps! Each step changes only one letter, and every word in the chain is a real word. Sometimes, there can be many different ways to solve the same word ladder puzzle.

Lewis Carroll first created these puzzles where the starting and ending words were often related, like being synonyms (words with similar meanings) or antonyms (words with opposite meanings).

There are also some variations of the game. In some versions, you might be allowed to add or remove a letter, or even rearrange the letters to make a new word (which is called an anagram).

Exploring Five-Letter Word Ladders

A famous computer scientist named Donald Knuth once used computers to study word ladders, especially those with five-letter words. He thought that three-letter word ladders were too easy. He also found that six-letter word ladders were less interesting because fewer pairs of words could be connected.

Knuth used a list of 5,757 common English five-letter words, making sure to leave out proper nouns (like names of people or places). He wanted to see which words could be connected to each other using a word ladder. He discovered that most of the words in his list could be linked!

However, he also found 671 words that couldn't form a word ladder with any other words in his collection. He called these words "aloof" because they were all by themselves, and "aloof" itself was one of them!

See also

In Spanish: Escala de palabras para niños