When I was a child, pretty much every children's magazine I subscribed to used to publish those little word-chain games where you had to get from one word to another — often an antonym — by replacing one letter at a time. To simplify (or complicate) things a little, you were allowed to take only a certain number of steps. So, for example, you had to build a word chain from "cold" to "warm":
c o l d
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _
w a r m
and one possible solution would be:
c o l d
c o r d
w o r d
w a r d
w a r m
Now, I have two questions:
- What is the English term for a word that differs from another word by just a single
letter, the length of both words being the same? - What is the term for such a word if the length doesn't matter? (Say, "band"-"brand", or "warm"-"war".)
In Russian, the answer to the first question is "метаграмма", which I would translate,
or rather transliterate, as "metagramm(e)" (obviously, of Greek origin). However, searching Wikipedia — or, in fact, the entire Web — for the term "metagramm(e)" doesn't seem to return any meaningful results.
As to the second question, I can't answer it in any language I am familiar with.
Can anyone offer any hints?
Best Answer
I was able to find the answer myself, thanks to help from Chris.
The answer to the first question is “orthographic neighbor”, introduced by Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson and Besner in 1977, or “substitution neighbor” in more recent research. The answer to the second question is “addition/deletion neighbor”.
Googling for these terms returns hundreds of relevant results, mostly papers such as:
Some great reading there.