Explore Letter Sequences

Letter sequences are useful when searching for words-within-words. While an online generator is great to quickly obtain a list of candidate words that are valid for lexagrams or anagrams, there is a lot of fun to be found in searching for words yourself!

Let’s explore…

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Look for words among the letters in that phrase. It’s easy to see SEA, easy to pick out AN at the end of Mediterranean. Any of the letters can be used, though, such as M … ITE from Mediterranean and S from Sea to make MITES. One can use the EA from Sea with the T from Mediterranean to make EAT. This technique involves much mental shuffling about of the letters. 

Changing the sequence of the letters in a phrase give our brains a fresh perspective on the situation. New words will seem to jump out after simply re-arranging the letters into a new pattern.

Look at the pattern if we take the letters in our phrase and put them into alphabetical order.

[wbcr_php_snippet id=”1912″ title=”Make Sequences” lex_intro=”off” lex_name=”Mediterranean Sea” lex_alphawhole=”on” lex_countwhole=”off” lex_countconvow=”off” lex_alphaword=”off” lex_altword=”off” lex_outro=”off”]

This process groups letters together in alphabetical order, all the A’s in one group, all the E’s in another group. What new words seem apparent with this shift? Is it easier to find DEEM, DINER or STAND?

What if we alphabetize the letters in each word? Does that affect how we view the patterns?

[wbcr_php_snippet id=”1912″ title=”Make Sequences” lex_intro=”off” lex_name=”Mediterranean Sea” lex_alphawhole=”off” lex_countwhole=”off” lex_countconvow=”off” lex_alphaword=”on” lex_altword=”off” lex_outro=”off”]

Notice that we have not summarized or removed any letters – if the source phrase has three A’s, there are still three occurrences of the letter A in the sequences. Viewing each word in alphabetical order makes it easier to see IN and TEA (the T at the end of first word a reversal of AE in the second word).

Another way to resequence the letters in a phrase is to organize them by their position in the phrase. All the 1st letters will be in one group; the 2nd letters in another group, etc. Study this pattern for a moment. Look at how different it is from the original spelling of the source phrase. Does shifting the letters around help you to see different words hidden within the phrase?

[wbcr_php_snippet id=”1912″ title=”Make Sequences” lex_intro=”off” lex_name=”Mediterranean Sea” lex_alphawhole=”off” lex_countwhole=”off” lex_countconvow=”off” lex_alphaword=”off” lex_altword=”on” lex_outro=”off”]

Here, our source phrase has only two words – and one is a short word – so there are only two letters in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd positions. The other positions are filled with the remaining letters in Mediterranean. However we can easily make out SEE, SEED, DATE, and IDEA.

When manually looking for words-within-words it is helpful to carefully rearrange the letters to make new terms easier to find. Continue exploring by studying the sequences for these people:

In the table above, notice the second sequencing style which counts the occurrences of each letter. Instead of showing, for example, AAA BB the sequence is coded as A3 B2. In this example, both methods indicate that the phrase contains three A’s and two B’s. The “Alphabetic Count” method is simply shorthand for the other sequence.

Tips for Finding Candidate Words

1. Search within the original phrase.
2. Sequence the phrase into alphabetical order and search for more words.
3. Alphabetize the letters in each word of the phrase and search again.
4. Group the 1st letters of each word, then the 2nd letters, etc, and search again.