Word.ws English Dictionary

word ladders

word ladders is the plural of word ladder.

Meaning of word ladder

Noun

word ladder (plural word ladders)

  1. A kind of puzzle in which one word must be transformed into another specified word of the same length by changing one letter at a time, each step yielding a valid intermediate word, as in lead → load → goad → gold.
  2. (crosswording) A type of cryptic crossword clue in which the each word in the clue defines a single term each varying by a single letter, and all the terms together form a word ladder between the first half of the solution and the second half.
    • But his real genius lay in the devising of many entirely new types of crossword, some of which have found enthusiastic imitators . 'Printer's Devilry', 'Playfair', and 'Word-Ladder' , for instance, were his invention1954, The Listener
    Synonyms:
    doublet, laddergram

Questions about word ladders

What is word ladders the plural of?
Word ladders is the plural of word ladder.

Words near word ladders in the dictionary

  1. word holes
  2. word is
  3. word is bond
  4. word it
  5. word ladder
  6. word ladders
  7. word line
  8. word lines
  9. word list
  10. word lists
  11. word lover

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: word ladders (page history and authors); word ladder (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “word ladders.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/word_ladders. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.