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English has lots of weird and wonderful ways to change a verb to past tense, and lots of homophones. I've found a couple of nice chains, where I alternate the two!

For example, "blow" to "blew" to "blue" to "blued".

I score my chains by the number of past tense pairs, so this is a length two chain.

Question: The longest chains I know are length three, and I know two disjoint chains of that length. The first words in both chains have something very simple in common. If you combine them together, they'll tell you how scary an enemy is.

Can you find those two chains?

Technicalities: To make a verb past tense means to move from a simple present tense verb to either a simple past or past participle verb. A homophone is a word with the same pronunciation. Spelling isn't involved, just meaning and pronunciation (homophones may have the same spelling). No past tense pairs may have the same pronunciation (thanks, @Pranay), and more generally no pronunciation may be used more than twice.

All words in my chains can be found on wiktionary, and my accent and dialect are General American.

Inspiration from this puzzle by @bhh. Thanks to @bobble for suggestions.

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  • $\begingroup$ i have found five chains of length 3, but i can't find the answer yet. is the answer just putting the two starting words side by side? also, are homographs allowed? $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday

3 Answers 3

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I believe the answer is

CR - that is, Challenge Rating, the stat in D&D for how powerful a monster is.

And I think @not-without-text got very close with it; I wouldn't have thought of this without seeing their list of chains, so I can't really take full credit for this.

The two chains share the property that

both start with an English letter.

The first chain is

C / see -> saw / saw -> sawed / sod -> sodded

and the second chain is

R / are -> were / whir -> whirred / word -> worded.

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    $\begingroup$ Correct! I'm accepting this answer, but @not-without-text sgares credit for their progress. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ Also, to clarify, the intention is not that the chains start with words homophonic with the letters you identified, but that they literally start with those letters - wiktionary counts letters as words, and chains can start with a homophone pair. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
  • $\begingroup$ @izzyg Oh, I didn't even think of that, that's so obvious in hindsight but also so clever. :D $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ Thank you! I've edited in the full answer, and well done, again! $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
  • $\begingroup$ If we allow an English accent I can get a 4 length chain (starting with a letter): rot13(P / Frr -> fnj / fnj -> fnjrq / fjbeq -> fjbeqrq / fbeqvq) $\endgroup$ Commented 10 hours ago
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I have not found the answer to the puzzle, but I have found several examples of three-length chains:

FINE (penalize) -> FINED / FIND (discover) -> FOUND / FOUND (establish) -> FOUNDED
BEAR (carry) -> BORE / BORE (puncture) -> BORED / BOARD (enter) -> BOARDED
LIE (recline) -> LAY / LAY (set) -> LAID / LADE (burden) -> LADED
SEE (view) -> SAW / SAW (cut) -> SAWED / SOD* (turf) -> SODDED
GILL (gillnet) -> GILLED / GILD (adorn) -> GILT / GUILT (shame) -> GUILTED
BE (exist) -> WERE / WHIR (hum) -> WHIRRED / WORD (phrase) -> WORDED
WRY (twist) -> WRIED / RIDE (travel) -> RODE / ROAD -> ROADED**

*provided that the "General American" accent has the cot-caught merger
**not a past tense, only an adjective, so it might not count

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    $\begingroup$ You found the right chains, you were super close! You share credit with @Idran for the solution. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ @izzyg i see, fine with me! i won't be wry; i can bear that, since my response did lie behind the basis of the solution. insert a sentence with "gill" in it. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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EDITED to add: This is an answer to the original question, which has since been updated to disallow past tenses that are spelled the same way as the verb itself.

How about

beat, beat, …, beat (38 times)?

This works because

the word “beat” has 19 different meanings as a verb on wiktionary, and its past tense is spelled and pronounced the same.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for pointing out this issue - I'll edit them question. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago

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