The Last Word

Well don't stop, now that you've got some momentum.... :-)

Actually here's an idea I dreamt up overnite. You have to work for your words around here, the hard evil taskmaster that I am. :-(

It's yet another word game ....

You have probably seen it, or a variant, in newspaper puzzle sections and the like:

- Transform one word into another, by substitution of one letter only at a time.

- Each successive word must be a legitimately defined English word.

- Each successive word must be of the same length.

- To add to difficulty, you can't use the same letter more than once in a given word.
[ So STARS, SCARS, SHALL, START etc .... would be illegal. ]

- Also the starting and ending words must use a different set of letters from each other. That is, they have no letters in common.

- You can take as many steps as you like, subject to the above.

For example, here's a bridge between WHALE and STORK thus:

WHALE
SHALE
SHARE
SHARK
STARK
STORK

It's also a minimal bridge in that it only takes 5 steps ( and has six words in all ).
[ It's probably not a unique solution for that number of steps ]

Now who can get me from :

LAST
.
.
.
.
to
.
.
.
.
WORD

???

Cheers, Mike.