WordsWorth Times (Play Together, Learn Together)

Grab your favorite dictionary and play WordsWorth Times. We'll show you how to calculate the WordsWorth Times of a word and suggest a bunch of activities for you and your students, family, and friends to try. As you play, you'll learn about word alakazams such as reverses, palindromes, semordnilaps, permutations, and anagrams.

WordsWorth Times is a game that intertwingles math and words. To play WordsWorth Times, you assign numerical values to the letters of the alphabet, a to z. The WordsWorth Times of a word is the product of the word’s letter values. The only math skill that you need to play is multiplication.

WordsWorth Times is designed to help children increase their knowledge of both math and language. The game has many variations that make it useful over a very wide range of grade levels and student abilities, from elementary school, “up, up, and away” to higher levels of learning.

Most of the work and play in WordsWorth Times is thinking: knowing words, browsing a dictionary to learn more words, and devising strategies for finding answers to questions, exercises, and investigations. Most enjoyable, we think. People are well equipped to do this type of work and play.

Some of the work is ho-hum tedious: looking up letter values and multiplying them to get the WordsWorth Times of a word. A calculator is an appropriate tool for this task. Using a number-crunching tool to do the calculating gives you more time to do the thinking.

Let's play!