What’s the largest known contiguous crossword square in English? By this I mean an n×n array of letters, such that each row and each column contains an English word when read left to right and top to bottom, respectively. Example of a 3×3 square:
pet
ere
age
The above contains the six words pet, ere, age, pea, erg, and tee. I’m sure it would be pretty easy to construct a 4×4 square. Maybe even 5×5. Has anyone come up with anything larger?
What’s the largest such square with no words repeated? What’s the largest such m×n rectangle?
The term you want is Word square. Or more specifically, since you want different horizontal and vertical words, a double word square.
The Wiki page (linked above) says the largest is of order 8, although they don’t give the example. If you really need it, I can post the Jeff Grant square it mentions, since I have the Word Ways issue. I’m not much into word squares, but I can put you in touch with Jeff, if you really want to pursue the subject. (Unfortunately, Rex Gooch, who did a lot work on word squares, has passed on to the great logological place in the sky.)
A related question: what’s the smallest possible English Scrabble game which uses every tile? By smallest, I mean area-wise; that is, able to be contained in an m×n rectangle on the board.
USA Today has a 4x4 one of these every day online. Admittedly, they often use the standard crossword-puzzle trickery like Roman numerals and proper names.
It’s possible that someone’s answered this at some time in Word Ways, but I checked the online list of articles here and couldn’t find a likely article. However, that list just has the articles’ titles and has not been updated since 1997. Again, Jeff Grant may know, since he’s a serious Scrabble player (I’m not). I think I’ll point this thread out to Jeff, since he’s not a Straight Doper. Perhaps he’ll become one and reply.
I emailed Jeff and he managed to find this pdf document, that has, on page 72, all 100 tiles within an 8x14 area. Lots of other stuff there for the compleat Scrabble fanatic. He also confirms that the largest double word square is indeed 8x8.
