Word Ladders

Everyone knows Lewis Carroll as the author of children's favourites "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", but he was also a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford and a composer of puzzles and entertainments. One of his most famous inventions is the Word Ladder Puzzle, in which one word is transformed into another, one letter at a time.

The puzzles

Here are a few word ladder puzzles to solve. The word at the top of the ladder is changed into another word on the next rung down the ladder by changing one letter only. The aim is to get to the word at the bottom of the ladder in the minimum number of steps. So to change LEAD into GOLD you can go from LEAD to LOAD to GOAD to GOLD. See if you can find solutions to the other three ladder puzzles here.

circles

Click here for the solutions.


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