Isograms
| No. of Players: | 1+ |
| Type of Game: | written |
| What you need: | pen and paper |
Goal
To find words containing letters used the same number of times.
How to play
Isograms are words that have non-repeating letters, or have letters that repeat the same number of times. Players challenge themselves and others to find different types of isograms according to whether the letters are used once, twice or three times. The player with the longest word in each category is the winner. Alternatively, the gamemaster prepares a list of isograms that are co-mingled with other non-isogram words and presents this list to the other players. The first player to correctly identify all the isograms is the winner and becomes the gamemaster for the next round.
Example
Aria gives Bianca two challenges: (A) Write down progressively longer words, starting with the one-letter word a, which contain letters that appear only once. (B) Find the longest words you can which contain letters that appear twice or even three times. Bianca is given 10-minutes. Here are her two lists:
| (A) | a, to, cat, desk, house, mister, isogram, neighbor, anxiously, mistakenly |
| (B) | deed, toot, peep |
Bianca got as far as a 10-letter word with non-repeating letters, and three 4-letter words with letters that appear twice. Additional examples include:
| (A) | birthplaces (11 letters), housewarming (12 letters), troublemaking (13 letters) |
| (B) | intestines (a 10-letter word with letters that appear twice) |
Did you know?
Your family may call her grandma, granny, or gram. But these nicknames are relatively recent, historically speaking. The full word 'grandmother' actually dates back to 1375–1425. It derives from the Old English ealde mōdor, literally meaning 'old mother.'
The origin of 'great-grandmother' (þridde mōdor, or 'third mother') is slightly more recent. It was first recorded around 1520–30. Incidently, the prefix grand- is used to refer to a person who is one generation removed, and the prefix great- indicates yet another generation.
Following this convention, 'great-great-grandmother' would be fēowerþe mōdor (fourth mother) and great-great-great-grandmother would be fīfte mōdor (fifth mother). Given that the average person lived just 35 years in the Early Middle Ages when Old English was spoken, few people back then would have had use for these terms. Other than speaking of mothers who were long since gone, of course.
However, that is not true today. There have been a few cases of single families with six generations alive at the same time. And even one family with seven. This occurred with the birth of Christopher John Bollig on January 21, 1989, which made Augusta Bunge Pagel a very-much-alive sixte mōdor – that is, a great-great-great-great-grandmother!
According to Guinness World Records, Augusta was born on October 13, 1879 in Tonawanda, New York. This made her 109 years, 3 months, and 8 days old at the time. Followed by her daughter Ella Sabin (aged 89), her granddaughter Anna Wendlandt (70), her great-granddaughter Betty Wolter (52), her great-great-granddaughter Debra Bollig (33), her great-great-great-granddaughter Lori Bollig (15), and her great-great-great-great-grandson Christopher.
Augusta died on May 18, 1989 in Medford, Wisconsin – no doubt quite proud of her amazing family!
In case you're wondering, the images under the title of this word game form a rebus puzzle:
I + SEW + GRAMS = ISOGRAMS
