A short history of the word ladder

The word ladder has an unusually precise origin story, and it comes from the inventor himself. In a letter printed in the magazine Vanity Fair in March 1879, Lewis Carroll explained that "just a year ago last Christmas", that is, at Christmas 1877, two young ladies with "nothing to do" had asked him to send them "some riddles". He had none at hand, so he invented a new kind of puzzle instead. The two young ladies are usually identified as Julia and Ethel Arnold.

Carroll first called the game Word-Links, and a small printed leaflet with that title appeared in Oxford in 1878. By the time it reached a wider public, it had a new name: Doublets.

Vanity Fair introduced the puzzle in its issue of 29 March 1879 under the heading "A New Puzzle", together with Carroll's letter. His rules were short: "Two words are proposed, of the same length; and the Puzzle consists in linking these together by interposing other words, each of which shall differ from the next word in one letter only." Letters had to keep their places, and the links had to be English words "such as might be used in good society". He called the two given words a Doublet, the words in between Links, and the whole series a Chain. His example turned HEAD into TAIL:

head

heal

teal

tell

tall

tail

The first three puzzles, printed in that same issue, were "Drive PIG into STY", "Raise FOUR to FIVE" and "Make WHEAT into BREAD". Over the following weeks readers were asked to evolve MAN from APE, make FLOUR into BREAD and change BLACK to WHITE, among many others.

From the 19 April issue, Vanity Fair ran Doublets as a prize competition, and the scoring will sound familiar to any Weaver player. Each puzzle was worth as many marks as there were letters in its two words, so a four-letter Doublet was worth eight. Readers who found the shortest possible chain received all of them, and one mark was deducted for every extra link. In other words, the target was the optimal ladder, and every move over it cost you.

Competitors soon sent in chains full of obscure words. When Carroll collected the puzzles in a book, Doublets: A Word-Puzzle (Macmillan, 1879), he added a glossary of admissible words, and its preface quotes a mock-desperate Vanity Fair column about the strange words readers had used. A second edition followed in 1880. A word list deciding what is and is not allowed is still at the heart of every word ladder game today.

In the same 1879 letter, Carroll gave the first piece of word ladder strategy. The easiest Doublets, he wrote, are those in which consonants in one word answer to consonants in the other and vowels to vowels, as with HEAD and TAIL. When that is not the case, as with HEAD and HARE, you should first turn one word into a word with the matching pattern, for example "head, herd, here", after which "there is seldom much difficulty in completing the Chain." That advice still works; our tips page shows it in action.

Carroll also experimented with the rules. Donald Knuth notes that Carroll suggested allowing a step to be an anagram of the previous word as well as a one-letter change, a convention that let him turn IRON into LEAD. Weaver keeps to the stricter original: one letter, same position, every time.

The puzzle has been sold under many names. Reference books list Doublets, word-links, change-the-word puzzles, paragrams, laddergrams and word golf. Laddergrams was the title of a 1927 book of these puzzles by John Earle Surrick and Lawrence Melvin Conant. Today "word ladder" is the most common English name, and it describes the shape well: a column of words, each one a rung away from the next.

The name word golf has a famous literary appearance. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire (1962), the narrator, Charles Kinbote, describes the poet John Shade's fondness for the game and lists his own best rounds: "hate—love in three, lass—male in four, and live—dead in five (with 'lend' in the middle)." Counting moves like strokes is what makes the golf name fit. The novel's index, in typical Nabokov fashion, hides the LASS to MALE solution in a chain of cross-references:

lass

mass

mars

mare

male

Word ladders also became a favorite example in computer science, because they are a natural graph problem. Treat every word as a point and connect two words when they differ in exactly one position; a word ladder is then a path between two points, and the shortest ladder is the shortest path.

The best-known study is in Donald Knuth's book The Stanford GraphBase (1993). Its LADDERS program works with 5,757 five-letter English words that Knuth had collected over some twenty years, connected by 14,135 one-letter links. One of his sample runs takes FLOUR to BREAD in six steps, the same pair Carroll had set in Vanity Fair in 1879:

flour

floor

flood

blood

brood

broad

bread

Knuth found that most of the words belong to one giant connected group of 4,493 words, and any two words in that group can be joined by a ladder. But 671 words have no neighbors at all. He called them aloof, and ALOOF is one of them. Some are everyday words that have been in the language for centuries, including THEIR, AGAIN, EARTH, HUMAN, YOUNG, MUSIC, OCEAN and SUGAR. Knuth also showed how the ladders change when only common words are allowed: with his 3,000 most frequent words, CHAOS to ORDER takes 13 steps through words like COSTS, HOSTS and ROSES.

Puzzles on this site are built the same way. For each pair of words, a breadth-first search explores the word list one step at a time, first every word one move from the start, then every word two moves away, and so on, until it reaches the end word. The first time it gets there is the shortest ladder, and that length is the optimal number you see on the result screen.

The word ladder's latest revival came with the daily word game boom of early 2022. In March 2022 the creator of a game called Weaver shared it on Reddit's Wordle community. It gave everyone the same pair of words each day, showed the optimal number of moves after you finished, and kept track of solved puzzles and streaks. The format caught on, and by the summer of 2022 puzzle sites were publishing daily hints and answers for it.

WeaverGame.org launched in July 2022 as an independent site built around the same idea. We are not affiliated with the makers of other games called Weaver; what we share with them is a puzzle that belongs to everyone, first published by Lewis Carroll almost a century and a half ago. In 2026 we added a five-letter daily, unlimited play, an archive, hints and 19 languages. You can read more about the site on the About page, or try today's ladder on the daily puzzle.