TRACKWORDS

by Clive Doig

TRACKWORD first appeared in The Radio Times in 1980, and has been a weekly feature ever since, apart from a short break at the end of 2002.

Over 1250 TRACKWORDS have been published and on this site you can try your hand at many many more.

All TRACKWORDS appear as letters in a 3x3 square grid such as this:

T	R	C
R	A	K
D	O	W

The object is to try and find as many words as you can of three-letters or more, by tracking through the grid, starting at any letter, from square to adjacent square, up, down, across or diagonally. You can only track through a letter square once in each word.

There is always a nine-letter word which tracks through the grid and therefore uses each of the nine letters once only.

The dictionary I have always used as reference for word validity is the Chambers Dictionary. Although many obscure words are still valid, especially Scottish variants, it is in my opinion, the best dictionary for wordsmiths and crossword addicts. Chambers is the authoritative reference for Scrabble and publishes many word reference books exlusively for such pastimes.

In Trackword certain words are not allowed.

• Proper nouns and names. e.g:- 'Albert', 'Paris', 'Borneo' etc.
• Entries in the dictionary headwords that are capitalised intially. e.g:- 'Chinese', 'Muslim' etc.
• Abbreviations, where they do not form a common acronym which is in regular use or are only in capitals. 'BBC', 'MOT' etc. ['radar' for instance would be acceptable]
• Shortened or abbreviated forms of longer words which require a full stop. e.g:- 'cal' which only appears in the dictionary as 'cal.' ['amp' and 'bio' would be acceptable]
• Prefixes which do not occur as separate words without a hyphen. e.g: 'neo' which only appears in the dictionary as 'neo-'
• Plurals formed by the addition of a single 'S'. e.g:- 'roads', 'ways' etc. [All other plurals, formed in any other way, are allowed e.g:- 'wives', 'flies'. The addition of a single 'S' is allowed if the word is the third person singular of a verb, e.g:- 'forms', 'mouths', 'lives' etc.]
• Obscene and vulgar slang words.
• Foreign words which do not occur in english outside a phrase. e.g:- 'fait' as in 'au fait' and 'fait accompli'
• Words which include accented letters, e.g:- 'tête', 'glacé' etc.

All other words and derivatives are allowed.

For each TRACKWORD an Average and a Brainbox score is suggested as possible to track within a certain time.

This site will eventually provide a new TRACKWORD for you to puzzle over every week. Meanwhile there are 20 to be getting on with, including the one given as an example, although there is no dictionary entry for the nine-letter word, as TRACKWORD is my own coined word.

T	R	C
R	A	K
D	O	W

Can you find 47 or more words of three-letters or more tracking through this grid in 25 minutes.

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