Puzzle-smith Edward "Ted" Bryan Clarke Inducted into Cambridge Who's Who Executive, Professional and Entrepreneurial Registry
Ted has been concentrating his interest on lexical, logical, cryptic and numerical puzzles and his fascination with words and language since his retirement.

NEWQUAY, UK, February 3, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Edward "Ted" Bryan Clarke, Editor of COMCAL and the inventor of the WordsWorth Compendium, has been recognized by Cambridge Who's Who for showing dedication, leadership and excellence in writing, researching, creating and solving all types of puzzles.

By trade, Ted is a chartered mechanical engineer who spent most of his career in the field of structural engineering. He began as a steelworks draughtsman but ended up in the aircraft industry due to his love of flying. He was the first ATC (Air Training Corps) cadet in Leicester to earn his Gliding Certificate, and was later to become a Gliding Instructor. As a design engineer, he worked on aircraft such as the 36-foot wingspan Auster to the Bristol Brabazon, which has a tailplane more than twice that span, to head the company's stress and strength testing section. He also subcontracted design work and became engaged on a highly-secret military tank's up-gunning. This led to an invitation to help set up a new research and development establishment, and he then spent the major portion of his working employment in senior positions within two large nationalized industries.

Upon his retirement, Ted concentrated his interest on lexical, logical, cryptic and numerical puzzles and his fascination with words and language. Feeling that today's publications contain uninteresting lists of abstruse words and 'done-to-death' variants, he accepted the challenge of writing a computer program to tackle the most enigmatic of all wordpuzzles, the tensquare, using words found in standard dictionaries while not requiring the use of proper names, or foreign or archaic words. He succeeded in January 1997 and published the tensquare in his quarterly WordsWorth magazine. The tensquare also appeared in the American Word Ways journal and the British newspapers the NewquayVoice, The Times and Daily Mail. This accomplished, Ted set his sights on producing a pangram, a reasonably well understood English sentence using each of the 26 letters of the alphabet once only, using the WordsWorth Compendium, which provided a list of all possible valid words lurking in its database. In 1994, he came up with "Meg Schwarzkopf quit Jynx Blvd." and believes this is yet to be bettered.

Ted believes that the most enduring wordplay will turn out to be the cryptic crossword because there are infinite ways to define its clues and a multitude of subject matter. And, because the same set of answers could arise from a vast variety of clues.

Ted realized the need of a massive number of words when he undertook the creation of the WordsWorth database, which lists over half a million 2- to 18-letter words. Then, having made such a large list readily available for the solving of crosswords, Ted saw the further need of several variants of this listing, such as Anagrams, to allow its use for other facets of wordplay. This led not only to searches for words containing missing letters but also for words required to solve other puzzles. A 'WordBuster' Conditional Database has been created, and is under further development. The WordsWorthWhile Website was first displayed on May 31, 1997 and to date has had more than 4640 visitors.

Owing to its database being comprised of sequential ASCII text files, which can be read by standard word processors, text editors and desk-top publishing programs, the Compendium offers far more individual search possibilities than the five main options in its opening menu. The 'WordBuster' Conditional Database currently has six fields of variants, the first of which contains a single complete alphabetical listing of ALL the words in WordsWorth's 442 files, i.e. in the 17 folders each containing their appropriate 26 ( A to Z ) files covering words from 2 to 18 letter words, plus a few longer words. The 'WordBuster' ConDat can be searched, filters applied to a number of fields simultaneously; provided, of course that the filter is valid, e.g. it couldn't be expected to find an alphword containing the letters *T*E*D* in that order. It will find, however, the 1,500 8-letter words from that filter pattern.

Users capable of writing simple programs, in say MicroSoft's Visual Basic, or Spectra's PowerBASIC in which the WordsWorth Compendium was written, can very quickly create the source code to undertake virtually any search they may require.

For more information, please visit http://dictionary-thesaurus.com/ArchiveIndex.html

Contact information:

Edward "Ted" Bryan Clarke
Menanhyl Trenance
Mawgan Porth
Newquay Cornwall
TR8 4DA
Tel: 01637 860 575
nobby@wordsmith.force9.co.uk

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