Minimal Pair Puzzles and Word Meaning Ten illustrative, challenging puzzles. Posted June 7, 2022 ... The pair cat-rat is called a “minimal pair” in linguistics.

It’s the fact that the hero is a linguistics professor! ... MINIMAL PAIRS. The concept of the minimal pair is crucial for figuring out what the units of a specific language are.

To use a linguistic term, “r” and “l” are minimal pairs in English, which means that changing just that sound in a word changes the meaning of that word (i.e. “rap” and “lap”).

Wordplay that involves changing one letter in a given word to produce a different legitimate word can be traced to Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece puzzle called the doublet. For example, given the ...