A blog for fans of Bananagrams, word games, puzzles, and amazing things

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Stupid Bananagrams tricks: Word grid with mirror symmetry

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to make a perfectly symmetric Bananagrams word grid using all 144 Bananagrams tiles. I decided to use mirror symmetry, so a word spelled out horizontally on the left hand side would have to be reversed on the right hand side and yet still spell a real word. Can it be done? Let's find out.

First, I consulted my letter distribution for Bananagrams to see which letters occurred an odd number of times in a Banangrams set. For instance, there are three W tiles, so I knew that at least one (and possibly all three) would have to occur on the center line of the grid to maintain mirror symmetry.

I then tried to build those letters into vertical words. Next I built some horizontal palindromes off of those center-line words. I got some good palindromic words from Wiktionary.

Finally, I worked on linking everything up. This step took the longest time. Fortunately, I found a list of words, that when reversed, yield different English words (like "tuba" and "abut"). These are called "semordnilaps". I particularly liked the ERGO/OGRE pair, so I managed to work that one into my grid. After a lot of fiddling around, I wound up with the grid shown below.
       C
H
GAG
R
M
OH E HO
I MADAM I
N A A N
KNOW WONK
E B E
U EYE U
R R R R
OGRE ERGO
BUN NUB
O O
X J P J X
RECAPS A SPACER
S I L V L I S
L A E A L
T T
Q DEIFIED Q
U A L A U
I Z O Z I
TIDE EWE EDIT
V O O V
Y TIN NIT Y
F T F
STATS
D
Voila! The world's first palindromic Bananagrams grid!