29 interesting word pairs that differ by one letter
During a recent trip with my kids, we started playing word games to pass the time in the airport and on the plane. A new game we came up with was to start naming pairs of words that differ by only one letter.
We came up with quite a few simple word pairs, such as cat/bat; rate/date; purr/pure. But the game made me wonder about longer word pairs and how the one-letter difference changed the meanings in interesting ways.
After several searches through online dictionaries, Scrabble dictionaries, blogs, and an article from Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics,* here is a list of such words.
- Abide/abode
- Absorption/adsorption
- Accent /accept
- Befuddle/bemuddle
- Coal/coax
- Claimed/clammed
- Fabled/failed
- Foster/zoster
- Grate/irate
- Hiss/ kiss
- Incommutable/incomputable
- Installation/ instillation
- Jilt/kilt
- Land/ laud
- Loft/lout
- Major/ mayor
- Prescription/ proscription
- Quart/ quartz
- Quest/ guest
- Quilt/built
- Revenge/revenue
- Skull/scull
- Takes/taxes
- Torment/torrent
- Waited/wasted
- Whether/whither
- Whimper/whisper
- Whistle/ whittle
- Wordless/workless
How about you, my fellow wordsmiths? Which pair is your favorite? Any other word pairs to add to the list?
*And yes. There is such a publication as Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. I am now a subscriber.
This post was first published on Ragan Communication’s PR Daily.
