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
Four-letter word category includes words that are euphemistic evasions of "stronger" words, as well as those that happen to be short and have both an expletive sound to some listeners as well as a sexual or excretory meaning (many also have other, non-vulgar meanings): "" (US), "", "", "" (US), "" (UK, NZ, AUS), "" and "", as several examples. Finally, certain four-lettered terms with limited usage can be considered offensive by some, within the regional dialect in which they are used, such as "" and "mary". Occasionally the phrase "four-letter word" is humorously used to describe common words composed of four