Beheadment and Decapitation—of Words

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ian calling from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hi, Ian. Welcome to the program.

Occasionally, I will notice that certain words can lose letters sequentially and still stay valid words. Maybe this is from playing too much Scrabble. But, for example, the word drama can lose an A and become dram, and then you lose the D and it becomes ram, and then am, and then just the article a. I was just wondering if there’s a name for words like that that can lose letters and still be words.

Well, Ian, have I got an organization for you. Do you know about the National Puzzlers League?

I don’t.

Okay. Well, this is an organization of like-minded folks. And they have a website where they have a lot of terms listed for the names of these kinds of word games. And so I have a couple of words for you. If it’s removing the first letter, it’s called beheadment. So, like, for example, you know, you might take the word factor and take off the F and you still have a word, right? You still have actor. And if you’re removing it from the end of the word, that’s called curtailment. So aspiring might become aspirin, for example. But you can’t obviously take those words down to a single letter. But that’s what the process is called. And if they’re taken from either end, that’s called transdeletions. So I guess the point is that there are people who think the way you do, and they have terms for these.

Fascinating. Beheadment and curtailment.

Yes. And just to make it more complicated, sometimes other groups call them beheading or decapitation or apharicis. And curtailment is also sometimes called apocopete. And if you take off the first and the last letter at the same time, they’re called terminal deletion.

Wow. Fascinating. So, Martha, that National Puzzlers League website is at what?

It’s puzzlers.org. We’ll link to it on our website. Do you have any other words, by the way, Ian, that work that way?

You know, I tried to think of some other ones. The only one I’ve got is the word kinky.

Oh. Kinky. So you get kink, then ink, then in, and I. It seems to, depending on how you play the game, only words with A or I or maybe O, if you consider the letter O to be a word of its own.

Interesting. Yeah, that’s one of the curiosities of English, isn’t it?

Yeah, the only one I can think of besides that is slate. You know, you can go, your flat would look like slate, late, eight, at, and A. But again, you’re right. It’s got an A and not an O.

I have a few. Well, there’s a kind of beheadment or beheading called a teetotaler where it only involves a word beginning with the letter T. But here’s some words that you can play with. Triaspirate, A-S-P-I-R-A-T-E. It becomes spirate, which means to breathe out, pirate, rate, eight, T-E, which is an alternate spelling of T-E-E and other words, and then the letter E, which is the musical note.

That’s great. That’s a big one. Well, scat, cat, and we’ll talk to you another time, Ian.

Yeah, do check out the National Puzzlers League. They’re your people.

I will definitely. Thank you very much, both of you.

Yeah, take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, take care.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.