29 interesting words pairs that differ by one letter
Vocabulary aficionados can appreciate the multitude of additional terms that come from a single change.
During a recent trip with my kids, we started playing word games to pass the time in the airport and on the plane. A new game we came up with was to start naming pairs of words that differ by only one letter.
We came up with quite a few simple word pairs, such as cat/bat; rate/date; purr/pure. But the game made me wonder about longer word pairs and how the one-letter difference changed the meanings in interesting ways.
After several searches through online dictionaries, Scrabble dictionaries, blogs, and an article from Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics,* here is a list of such words.
• Abide/abode
• Absorption/adsorption
• Accent /accept
• Befuddle/bemuddle
• Coal/coax
• Claimed/clammed
• Fabled/failed
• Foster/zoster
• Grate/irate
• Hiss/ kiss
• Incommutable/incomputable
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