Word Pyramids – A Delightful Vocabulary Puzzle

To create a word pyramid, you start with a single letter, and then add one letter per step. Each step must be a valid word. The goal is to arrive at a particular word. Say, go from A to BRANDS or A to PLANET.

Here’s a sample Word Pyramid that goes from A to BRANDS:

You add one letter at each level and each level in the word pyramid must be a valid word. (You can define “valid” however you’d like!)

So, what if you started with I? How far could you go?:

Now, I think the trickiest step is that two-letter word, so I’d have students build a big word bank. How many valid two-letter words can we come up with to use in our word pyramids?

Then, feel free to change the rules a bit:

• What if you could delete one letter or add a letter?
• What if you could rearrange the letters at each step?
• What if you could only add to the front?
• and so on…

Sometimes the best idea for these puzzles is just to let students play with them rather than giving strict rules. See what sort of word pyramids they can come up with!

I found this idea in a used copy of A Book of Puzzlements.