word ladder
v1.0.0
A word ladderis a sequence of words where consecutive words differ by one letter change. For example: CAT → COT → DOT → DOG.
Lewis Carroll invented word ladders as a kind of puzzle game; his 1879 Vanity Fair article proposed turning HEAD into TAIL with four words in between: HEAD → HEAL → TEAL → TELL → TALL → TAIL.
This tool lets you design your own word ladders, with a variety of different rules and constraints:
Dictionary: Two dictionaries of English words are available:
10,000 English word list by Eric Price
370,000 English word list by dwyl — Warning: This currently makes the software run slow.
You can also add your own extra words, or forbid words from the dictionary that you don't like. Click an × button to remove a word in the current ladder.
Operations: In addition to allowing single letters replacements, you can optionally enable:
Swapping two adjacent letters.
Inserting a new letter (increasing the word length).
Deleting a letter (decreasing the word length).
Objectives:
You can specify a target word to reach, or just search for ladders from a start word.
You can look for shortest ladders. With a goal, this finds the fastest way between two words. Without a goal, this finds a longest shortest ladder (the radius of the source in the graph).
You can search among all ladders. In this mode, you see all the options available at each step, and you can choose which word to go to next. As a starting point, the ladder starts with the shortest one. Each word is labeled with the number of steps to the goal (if there is a goal), so you can tell which choices get you closer vs. farther away. This can be helpful for designing a word ladder of a desired length.
Try it out now!
This software was originally created to design word ladders for a folded-paper and blown-glass sculpture called Brush With Words. For this purpose, it includes a link for rendering the current word ladder in our strip folding font.
