Remembering Rex Gooch

I found out today that an old friend of mine, Rex Gooch, passed away. I just wanted to say a few words about him to some of my friends who never had the pleasure to know him.

He was from Letchworth, England and a graduate of Cambridge. He eventually developed a passionate fondness for words and word puzzles, something we both shared. My interest eventually led to me becoming a member of the National Puzzlers' League and to the journal Word Ways, which is how I met Rex. At this point in time the Holy Grail of word puzzles was constructing a 10-letter word square, which is a square consisting of 10-letter words reading the same down as across.

Here's an example of an 8-square, found by Richard Sabey:

crabwise
ratlines
atlantes
blastema
winterly
intertie
seemlier
essayers

And a 9-square I found:

karatekas
apocopate
rosecolor
acetoxime
tokokinin
epoxidize
kalinites
atomizers
serenesse

At this point many 9-letter word squares had been found, including Eric Albert's, which had every word in the same dictionary. But no 10-letter word squares.

I, of course, being young and stupid, tried to find one and failed miserably. But this did lead me to propose a probabilistic model of word squares, which fit the available data very well. My conclusion was that you'd need about 90000 different 9-letter words before you should expect to find a 9-letter word square among them, and an astonishing 230000 10-letter words before you'd expect to find a 10-letter word square among them. So it's no wonder that no one had found a 10-letter word square, there weren't that many 10-letter words!

Enter Rex Gooch. He realized that there were, in fact, this many 10-letter words, if you include biological and geographical words. So he meticulously began to gather 10-letter words. He contacted me at this point, and I sent him a copy of a program that I had written that would search every possible combination for 10-squares. I pointed out to him that it'd take approximately a year to run, but always the eccentric Briton, this didn't bother him in the least. He had the desire and the time. The program got modified over that year, in order to handle such things as power outages, and to make it more efficient.

The result?

descendant
echeneidae
shortcoats
cerberulus
enteromere
necrolater
dioumabana
adaletabat
naturename
tesserated

That's 7 dictionary words, 2 geographical words, and one species name. Crazy? Yes. Pointless? Rex didn't think so, and I didn't, either.

He eventually pushed the barrier even further, and by adding the names of people and some foreign words he was able to find an 11-letter word square:

morrismoses
orientirani
rimisurante
reidpainter
inspiradors
stuartmason
miriamgreco
orandarilor
santoseller
enterocoele
siersnorren

He ran his computer for years to find this square.

Rex, thanks for everything. The puzzles you built and the articles you wrote have brought me a great deal of pleasure over the years.