Word square
The square became a powerful religious and magical symbol in medieval times, and despite over a century of considerable academic study, its origin and meaning are still a source of debate.
The following 12×12 array of letters appears in a Hebrew manuscript of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage of 1458, said to have been "given by God, and bequeathed by Abraham".
Modern research indicates that a 12-square would be essentially impossible to construct from indexed words and phrases, even using a large number of languages.
Additionally, various methods have produced partial results to the 10-square problem: Since 1921, 10-squares have been constructed from reduplicated words and phrases like "Alala!
Darryl Francis and Dmitri Borgmann succeeded in using near-tautonyms (second- and third-order reduplication) to employ seven different entries by pairing "orangutang" with "urangutang" and "ranga-ranga" with "tanga-tanga", as follows:[9] However, "word researchers have always regarded the tautonymic ten-square as an unsatisfactory solution to the problem.
From the 1970s, Jeff Grant had a long history of producing well-built squares; concentrating on the ten-square from 1982 to 1985, he produced the first three traditional ten-squares by relying on reasonable coinages such as "Sol Springs" (various extant people named Sol Spring) and "ses tunnels" (French for "its tunnels").
His continuing work produced one of the best of this genre, making use of "impolarity" (found on the Internet) and the plural of "Tony Nader" (found in the white pages), as well as words verified in more traditional references: By combining common first and last names and verifying the results in white-pages listings, Steve Root of Westboro, Massachusetts, was able to document the existence of all ten names below (total number of people found is listed after each line): Around 2000, Rex Gooch of Letchworth, England, analyzed available wordlists and computing requirements and compiled one or two hundred specialized dictionaries and indexes to provide a reasonably strong vocabulary.
The largest source was the United States Board on Geographic Names National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
[5][10] There are a few "imperfections": "Echeneidae" is capitalized, "Dioumabana" and "Adaletabat" are places (in Guinea and Turkey respectively), and "nature-name" is hyphenated.
However, modern combinatorics has demonstrated why the 10-square has taken so long to find, and why 11-squares are extremely unlikely to be constructible using English words (even including transliterated place names).
The opposite problem occurs with small squares: a computer search produces millions of examples, most of which use at least one obscure word.
Smaller word squares, used for amusement, are expected to have simple solutions, especially if set as a task for children; but vocabulary in most eight-squares tests the knowledge of an educated adult.
