Alchemy is a nifty little program for finding word ladders. A word ladder is a sequence of words made by changing one letter at a time. Given any two words, Alchemy will find the shortest ladder between them (using the current word list), or beep if no ladder can be found. The following screen dump shows how to turn FLOUR into BREAD:

Alchemy has a number of handy features:

• You can find random ladders and longest ladders.

• Word lists can be modified. The Edit window lets you find, add or delete words. Grep-like patterns can be used to select one or more words; the following example shows how to find all words without any vowels:

• Read a given text file and add new words to the current word list; very handy for creating a new word list from scratch.

• Find all isolated words in the current word list and remove them. (An isolated word cannot be changed into any other word and thus can't appear in any ladder.)

• Word lists contain user-definable characters. The default character set includes accented letters and other 8-bit characters used in most languages based on the Roman script.

• Save your favorite ladders for later recall.

• Detailed help is provided in the Help menu.

The shareware fee for Alchemy is $20 for an individual or $200 for a group (like a school or university). You can pay by check, cash or credit card at the secure Kagi Online Order site, or you can use the Register app supplied with Alchemy.

I provide email support to registered users, so send all your bug reports, queries and suggestions to andrew@trevorrow.com. Note that additional word lists are available to registered users on request (all isolated words have been removed):

Alchemy is a Carbonized app that runs natively on OS X. It also runs on OS 8.6/9.x if CarbonLib 1.3 or later is installed.

Download the latest version (1.5) from here [224K].