You start with two words of the same length. The Doublets game, which Lewis Carroll created to entertain children, uses a gameplay design similar to Scrabble Slam. This game would become a popular magazine word game at the time and a classic game formula today. (We’ve included the answer to the Windsor Enigma at the bottom of this article, in case you want to try to solve it on your own first.) Lewis Carroll’s Doublets Word Game (1877)ĭuring the Christmas season of 1877, on Christmas Day itself, Lewis Carroll (of Alice and Wonderland fame) created a word game called Doublets. “The INITIALS of the following places form the name of a town in England, and the FINALS (read upwards) what that town is famous for.”īy stacking the answers to each question in sequential order, someone can read each location’s first letter from top to bottom and their last letter from bottom to top to deduce the answer. Reportedly, Queen Victoria herself created the puzzle. Perhaps the most noteworthy puzzle to come out of the 1800s was the Windsor Enigma. They were ways to entertain and puzzle people while also demonstrating the crafty wit of those who created them. It was during the Victorian era in the 19th century that word games truly became popular. The Windsor Enigma and Other Victorian Word Puzzles (1800s) However, researchers have since discovered a copy of the Sator Square in the ruins of Pompeii, which predates the Christian church by about a century. Originally, historians believed that Christians were the first to use the square. “Pater Noster” translates to “Our Father,” which is the start of the Lord’s Prayer. If you rearrange all of the letters in a specific way and leave the N in the middle, you can create the phrase “Pater Noster” in both horizontal and vertical lines. During the early days of the Christian church, Christians would use cryptic codes and markings to help believers find each other and escape persecution. The other most common use for the Rotas Square was for religious purposes. Pater Noster and the Early Christian Church Many people in the ancient world inscribed the Sator Square on doorways or on items like talismans or amulets in hopes that the square would protect them. The patterns the letters create were believed to signify that a person or home was to be spared of any harm. Some researchers believe the original purpose was to ward off evil spirits. Currently, historians have a vague understanding of some practical reasons people would repeatedly create the square. The precise origins of the Sator Square and its uses aren’t entirely known. You can even rotate the Rotas Square 180 degrees and still be able to read all five words. In other words, you can read the Sator Square from top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right and right-to-left. When set in the correct order, this word square becomes a palindrome with four symmetries. Taken as a whole, the Sator Square words roughly translate as, “The farmer Arepo uses his plow to work.” Though there are several ways to translate and interpret the words, this is the general message across all variants. Tenet: To hold, keep or preserve something. These words are:Īrepo: A proper name, possibly Egyptian in origin. The Sator Square is a square made of five, five-letter words. Historians have found this particular word square throughout what used to be the Ancient Roman Empire. And the earliest-known example of a word square is the Sator Square, also known as the Rotas Square. One of the oldest and most well-known examples of wordplay is the word square. Understanding the Sator Square (79 AD or Earlier) And, we can trace the history of word games we play today back to those early creative uses of language. Regardless of language, all groups and societies have their own forms of wordplay. Word games have essentially existed for as long as there have been words, both spoken and written.
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