How are the word records of the Taxonomy of Wordplay organized, classified and scored?

This is a hierarchy of types of wordplay.  The top level of the
hierarchy comprises "Spelling," "Pronunciation," "Etymology," and
"Meaning", and there are up to five levels below the top level.  For
example, the longest word that can be typed on the top row of the
typewriter is listed under "Spelling," "Structure," "Typewriter Order,"
"Entire Word," "typewriter top row," "longest."

Under each wordplay category, there is a list of words, phrases or word
groups that are the best known example of that form of wordplay.  These
record-holders have been divided into these classes:

  common words
  uncommon words
  hyphenated words
  phrases
  hyphenated phrases

The Introduction explains how we determined that a word is common.
Phrases is a catch-all class that in addition to phrases proper
includes contractions, initialisms, words like "86ed" that contain
digits, and other oddities such as "and/or."

A record for a lower class (e.g., uncommon words) is only listed if it
is better than the record for a higher class (e.g., common words). For
example, if there are both common and uncommon palindromes with eight
letters, then only the common one is listed; an uncommon palindrome
would need at least nine letters to be listed.

The class of a word group is the lowest class of any word in it. Thus
if a group contains an uncommon word and nothing from a lower class,
i.e., no hyphenated words or phrases, then it is listed in the uncommon
word class.

The score, if applicable, associated with a record-holding word or word
group follows it and is enclosed in parentheses. This is usually the
number of letters in the word, but depending upon the particular
record, it may be the number of syllables, the number of vowels, the
ratio of selected letters to length, one or more related words, etc.

If there is a tie for the record, the score is followed by "-t," and the
most common words or groups that tie for each record are listed. The
commonality of a word group is the commonality of the least common word
in it. Tying words or phrases are separated by commas; tying groups are
listed on separate lines. Up to six common words or groups are listed;
if there are more than six, five are listed with a count of additional
words. Up to three uncommon words or groups are listed and up to two
for the other classes. If one form of a word is listed (e.g.,
"barbarian"), the other related forms (e.g., "barbarians," "barbaric,"
"barbarism", etc.) are omitted. Thus less than six common words will be
listed if all the other words are forms of the already listed words.

Many word groups are termed "well-mixed." Well-mixed word groups contain
words that do not share any string of four letters. This is done
because there may be larger groups that contain many forms of the same
word, or many identical prefixes or suffixes, etc. Such answers are
not listed since the space could better be used listing more
interesting words.

Sources:
Bnnn = page nnn of Beyond Language, Dmitri Borgmann, Scribner's, 1967
Lnnn = page nnn of Language on Vacation, Dmitri Borgmann, Scribner's, 1965
Mnnn = page nnn of Making the Alphabet Dance, Ross Eckler, St Martin's, 1996
mm-nnn = page nnn of Volume mm of Word Ways (published in year 1967 + mm)

Indices [5-240,11-51,17-179]
Reviews [8-180,9-161,11-74,12-3,83,181,16-35]

Entries may refer to articles in "Wordplay, A Curious Dictionary of
Language Oddities" by Chris Cole, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc, New York
1999, 191 pages. Introduction by Will Shortz. ISBN 49725-01797

-- Taxonomy of Wordplay, www.questrel.com (retrieved 28 Oct 2026)