What is "eodermdrome"

An eodermdrome is a form of word play wherein a word (or phrase) is formed from a set of letters (or words) in such a way that it has a non- planar spelling net. The eodermdrome was conceived and described by Gary S. Bloom, John W. Kennedy, and Peter J. Wexler in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics in 1980.

It is well illustrated by the word eodermdrome itself. Eodermdrome contains only the letters e, o, d, r and m. When plotted as a graph, the lettered vertices are sequentially connected by edges to spell a word. If the graph is non-planar, the word is an eodermdrome. The graph of eodermdrome is the non-planar graph K.

Eckler searched for all eodermdromes in Webster's Dictionary. One of his examples is supersaturates. The graph of the complete word contains the non- planar graph K as a subgraph and is, as such, itself non-planar.

By extension, the vertices can be identified with words instead of letters to form eodermdromic phrases or sentences.

The concept has been studied within both mathematics and linguistics.