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Word Ladder asks you to turn one word into another by changing a single letter at a time, with every step a real word. Lewis Carroll invented the puzzle in 1877 and called it Doublets. It is a genuine search problem — most direct routes fail because an intermediate step is not a word.
You are given a start word and a target word.
Change exactly one letter to make a new real word.
Repeat, one letter at a time.
Every intermediate step must be a valid word.
Reach the target in as few steps as you can.
Lexical search under constraint — navigating the space of real words rather than letter strings. It is a genuinely different word skill from anagramming.
Change vowels first. Vowel substitutions produce valid words far more often than consonant substitutions do.
Work from both ends towards the middle. It halves the search.
Compare the start and target letter by letter and change the differing positions last, not first.
If stuck, take a step that seems to move away from the target. Direct routes are often blocked.
Lewis Carroll, in 1877, under the name Doublets. He published them as a puzzle column.
Yes. That constraint is the entire puzzle.
No — exactly one per step.
Because the shortest path in letters is usually blocked by a non-word. Detours through apparently unrelated words are normal and often necessary.