Composing forms

by Ajax

Friends and fellow puzzlers, I write of the joy and zest in the sport of making forms. Yes, forms, those lowly, almost forgotten vestiges of the logomaniacs’ art.

Must you have a bookshelf of references, a computer, or limitless time? Not at all—all a formist needs are a good dictionary and a used envelope to scribble on. Is form building tame unless you construct 17-diamonds, or 9‑squares, or huge pyramids? Again, no! Fitting words together one after another and digging out the last elusive term to complete the form are exciting with 5‑squares, 6‑squares, or 9- diamonds, and in my view as rewarding as work on any other variety of Enigma puzzle.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose we decide to make a square on the base word HASTEN. Incidentally, formists discovered long ago that it’s better to build from the bottom up than from the top down. That’s because as we work up we can make common endings, like ‑ING and ‑ATE, giving us many words to choose from; fixing a few letters at the start limits these possibilities considerably.

     H
     A
     S
     T
     E
HASTEN

The first step is to jot down the base word. What words end in H? A common ending is ‑ISH. That means the fourth word must begin with I and end in T. What are some of the possibilities? INVENT, INVEST, INTENT, among others. At this stage, it’s good to have words where variation from one to another is possible by the change of a single letter—it gives us greater flexibility. Beginning with INVENT, we now have the square below.

   ISH
   N A
   V S
INVENT
S  N E
HASTEN

What can the fifth word be? Maybe STANCE. That would give us ‑NTA and — VAS as endings for the second and third words. We’d prefer ‑VES to ‑VAS, so we investigate S – EN ‑ E as an alternative to STANCE. Nothing comes to mind, so we see if ‑VAS is possible. How about CANVAS? ‑ ‑ CISH looks bad, so we give up on CANVAS.

  FISH
  ENTA
FESTAL
INTENT
STANCE
HALTER

For the first word, there’s OFFISH or OAFISH. We’ve got it made if we can find F ‑ ENTA or A ‑ ENTA. Dictionary thumbing rules out FLENTA and FRENTA, so we start through the alphabet: ABENTA, ACENTA, etc. In the AM’s we find AMENT and AMENTIA—near misses. Hold it! A few words down the page there’s AMENTUM, “a thong or cord for throwing a javelin”, and its plural is AMENTA. Eureka! We have an all-dictionary 6‑square without a single tag!

OAFISH
AMENTA
FESTAL
INTENT
STANCE
HALTER

[Note: This article is taken as-is (other than minor formatting changes) from the Guide to the Enigma with gratitude to Ajax]