Cranking the Word Machine

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Henrion deduced from the fact that the Word Machine is "twenty foot square" that the anagrams are written in a simplified, twenty-letter alphabet, as follows:

A B C D E F G H I * * L M N O P * R S T U * X Y
J can be written as I, Q as C, K as C, V as U, W as UU, and Z as S.

Tribnia and Langden are only simple anagrams of Britain and England, and easy to decipher. It is only when we transpose and shift groups of letters, usually in threes or fours, and in vertical columns, do the anagrams become a great deal more difficult to decipher.

How then can we crack Swift's transposed anagrams? One way is by educated guessing, using a knowledge of Swift's time period, and an understanding of his state of mind based on letters and other writings before 1726, when the book was published.

By trying out different possibilities, and by testing them against columns and sets in the simplified 20 letter alphabet, we can indeed come to an understanding of Swift's "deepest designs."

The following chart shows how YAHOO is found to be the anagram of IRISH. To crack the code, one must first lay out the vertical progression of the letters of YAHOO in the twenty-letter alphabet, as follows:

	Y	A	H	O	O
1	A	B	I	P	P
2	B	C	L	R	R
3	C	D	M	S	S
4	D	E	N	T	T
5	E	F	O	U	U
6	F	G	P	X	X
7	G	H	R	Y	Y
8	H	I	S	A	A
9	I	L	T	B	B
10	L	M	U	C	C
11	M	N	X	D	D
12	N	O	Y	E	E
13	O	P	A	F	F
14	P	R	B	G	G
15	R	S	C	H	H
16	S	T	D	I	I
17	T	U	E	L	L
18	U	X	F	M	M
19	X	Y	G	N	H

As suspected answers must be tested, the easiest method is to "put the owners in chains", to plot only the rows containing the letters of IRISH contained in the YAHOO progression in a separate chart:

	Y	A	H	O	O
7	-	H	R	-	-
8	H	I	S	-	-
15	R	S	-	H	H
16	S	-	-	I	I
	I	R	I	S	H

Line 7 - HR - and line 16 - SII - contain the letters which produce an anagram of IRISH.

Henrion suggests that, for the anagrams to be possible, "sometimes the exceptional group will have one letter less than the others instead of one more, but the difference will never be more than one either way, and no group will ever be inferior to two letters."^[1]

To verify the anagram of, say, HOUYHNHNM, the largest possible group of letters must be tried first; in this case, 5-4. This will be found to be unsuitable, so 3-3-3 must be tried, and the latter, as it turns out, fits. A group such as' 4-3-2 cannot be used because there are two exceptional groups, or the difference between two of the groups is more than one. Likewise, a 4-2 or a 5-3 group, to give an example, would not be admissible.

Two groups of 3 and 2 letters is the only possible way to approach the word, YAHOO. It can be seen in the previous chart- that HR and SII can be jumbled to make IRISH, without the vertical columns overlapping. The solution is best written in the following way:

Y A H O O