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Article: Letter banks from the chemical elements.
- Article from:
- Word Ways
- Article date:
- November 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Jeremiah Farrell. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This article returns to one of our favorite themes, the names of the chemical elements. We started by taking the names of the chemical elements, running from hydrogen (atomic number 1) to meitnerium (atomic number 109). We included some variant spellings (e.g., sulphur, sulfur) and variant names (e.g., for elements with atomic numbers 104-109).
We reduced the name of each element to its corresponding letter bank, the set of different letters used in each element name. So, for example, bismuth simply reduces to the letter bank BHIMSTU, but manganese reduces to the letter bank AEGMNS, and so on. We then set ourselves the challenge of finding another word, name or ...