Benzene is becoming a language blog. Not that I'm writing about language any more than I used to (less, I'd guess), but I've stopped writing about everything else. Word games is all I have at the moment. But maybe it's better than nothing.

Today I'm thinking about reasonably long words which, with the change of a single letter, turn into another word that feels completely different.

My favorite pair is hideous-hideout. Change one consonant, and all the vowel sounds are replaced, and even the number of syllables changes.

Another I recently stumbled upon is ministries, which becomes miniseries.

Any other favorites?

Honorable mention but no points for words where a letter change near the end results in a related word but with the accent shifted so that all the strong vowels become weak and vice versa (eg, photographs-photography, telephone-telephony, infinite-infinity, etc).

Some day I may write about the relation of long and short vowels in English, a favorite topic of mine. It's a remarkable pattern, which we native speakers tend to be oblivious to. It's also central to why I think spelling reform based on phonetics is a bad idea.

But that's a topic for another day.

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