November 2025 competition: see if two words are owl-linked

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November 2025 competition: see if two words are owl-linked
This month we're asking you to create a system to test whether you can change one given word into another one letter at a time, using just common words.

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 November 2025

Consider the two words SLATE and ROOFS. You can say that these are owl-linked, because they satisfy these conditions:

Condition	Notes
Same length	Both the words have the same number of letters.
No common letters	None of the letters in the two words matches (in Wordle you'd get a yellow for the S but no green for exact matches).
You can chain the words	It's possible to get from SLATE to ROOFS in the minimum possible number of words.

To see what I mean by the last point, here is the chain of words you'd need:

SLATE
SLATS
SLOTS
SOOTS
ROOTS
ROOFS

Other words I can find which are owl-linked are MONEY / BANKS and STOCK / SHARE, although these both have a letter in common (the N in MONEY and the S in STOCK respectively). If you want to try generating lists of words yourself as test data you could ask your favourite AI tool to help - I started with this prompt:

I want to come up with lots of examples of pairs of words like this:

(SLATE', ROOFS)

(STORE, DEPOT)

(EXCEL, RANGE)

(POWER, QUERY)

In each case there must be some connection between the two five-letter words, and they shouldn't share any letters in the right position (so EXCEL and SHEET wouldn't work because they both have E in the 4th position). Humorous, topical or computer software answers are especially welcome!

Please make sure that both of the words have 5 letters - this is really important.

Create a list initially of 50 pairs of words in the same format I've used. Don't include any extra explanation or text.

For this month's competition we're asking you to come up with a system to test whether two words are owl-linked. You'll almost certainly need a dictionary against which to test words - you can find one with an AI prompt like this:

Where can I download a text file English (UK) dictionary from?

You can create your answer in any of the following ways:

Some combination of Excel functions.
Programming in Python, C#, VBA, VB, Java or JavaScript
Some astute use of Power Query transforms
SQL (surely not the easiest way, but I don't want to pre-judge)
Any combination of the above

This month's £50 voucher will be divided into two parts: £25 will be given to the first "correct" answer picked out of our randomised sorting hat, and the other £25 will be given to the answer which the editor (thats's me, I'm afraid) considers to be the most elegant. If you don't want your answer to be made public, please let me know when you submit it.

My program used Python. While it might just about be deemed to be "correct", there's no way it would win any awards for elegance!

Please submit your answers by Friday 28th November to this email address:

The usual email address for submission of entries.

Good luck!

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