In case you have a few minutes to kill over your lunch break today, here is a fun word game. Take a word and knock one letter off at a time until you have no letters left. However, after the removal of each letter, what remains, without re-arrangement of letters, has to be a word.
Example
CAMELS
CAMEL
CAME
CAM
AM
A
NO LETTERS LEFT — WINNER!
Your word to start with is STARTLING, see if you can do it in 100 seconds.
If you want a hint, my own solution’s (there are several) 8 letter word was a bird.
If you can come up with other words that work well with this game please post them here.
Startling
Starling
Staring
Rating
Grant
Tang
Tan
At
A
Sorry Max as in the example there is no rescrambling of letters - I will add in an instruction to make the explicit
D’OH!
OH
O
: )
Startling
Starting
Staring
String
Sting
Sing
Sin
In
I
Bravo
Slightly different than my own solution which went through starling but a winner nonetheless
Or you could follow Staring with:
String
Sting
Sing
Sin
In
I
Startling
Starting
Stating
Statin
Satin
Sati
Sat
At
A
Quite clever!
STARTLING
Starting
stating
statin
satin
sain
sin
in
Impressive solution
Untrailed. Precourse. Deflation. Lacerated. Unpraised.
I can’t seem to find any with more than nine letters, though (depending a bit on what you accept as a “word”).
Thanks Katja, those will be fun to work through (I made the correction you mentioned re: Belittler)
UNTRAILED
UNT AILED
UNT ILED
UNT ILE
U T ILE
T ILE
T IL
T I
I
TI is the 7th of the major scale in the modified solfeggio system (it used to be si, which was problematic because then there are two note in the major scale with the same initial syllable (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti (formerly si), do.
Dennis sees a note where I see Titanium.
startling
starling
staring
taring
tarin
tarn
tan
an
a
Good solution, you made me look up “tarin” — are you a zoologist?
I arrived at “tarin” and guessed that it was a word; on looking it up I found that it was a bird.
I took the same approach each time I got stuck on Katja’s (see latest post)
Way less than 100 seconds, using a path others found:
starling
staring
string
sting
sing
sin
in
i
[...] number of people seemed to enjoy the word puzzle I posted earlier today. I therefore post for your amusement 4 other words to be trimmed down to nothing letter by letter [...]
Same through Sting, then:
Ting
Tin
In
I
startling
starting
staring
string
sting
ting
tin
in
I
Dang. Just googled ting. It’s in the urban dictionary, but not others.
I play Scrabble a lot and coulda sworn it was a word.
This is a very good example of the limits of the internet-google, etc. Ting is indeed a word, with several meanings noted in my copies of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Yay! I win!
“Ting” means “a single light metallic sound, as of a small bell” or as a verb, “to emit a light metallic sound.” Webster’s New College Dictionary II. See my comment just above yours.
starling
staring
string
sting
sing
sin
in
I
My solution as well
I got the same, but of course I is not a legitimate Scrabble word because it is always capitalized.