Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers's Conundrums: The Best Puzzles Are Made Out of Words

Everyone plays with language. The lockdown is a chance to take the fun to the next level.

April 18, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Try out your brain’s language faculties, perhaps with a bit of assist from the part that processes humor.
Photographer: Jolygon/iStockphoto

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During these recent weeks of lockdown, we've solved logic puzzles based around household objects – light switches and chessboards.1 Now it’s time to try another genre, one of my personal favorites: wordplay.

Making games out of words is literally ancient. Even the Romans had a precursor of our modern crossword. And, of course, wordplay comes naturally to everyone in the form of puns, tongue twisters and spoonerisms.2 Wordplay puzzles take things to the next level by seeking surprising relationships between words, such as the ability to convert one into another by shuffling letters – otherwise known as an anagram. Here's a famous one: