Word ladder The game was revived in Australia in the 1990s by The Canberra Times as "Stepword". The player is given a "start word" and an "end word". In order to win the game, the player must change the start word into the end word progressively, creating an existing word at each step. Each step consists of a single letter substitution. For example, the following are the seven shortest solutions to the word ladder puzzle between words "cold" and "warm", using words from Collins Scrabble Words. Often word ladder puzzles are created where the "end word" has some kind of relationship with
Letter frequency word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the root word of "abstract". This system results in letters like "s" appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. A final variant is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like "th" becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the". Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing