The Saussurean theory of verbal thinking holds that meanings of words exist within an interdependent system.

Change-a-Letter puzzles highlight how altering a single letter or sound within a word produces new concepts.

Change-a-Letter puzzles ultimately illustrate how meaning emerges relationally.

The 19th-century Swiss philologist, Ferdinand de Saussure, is widely acclaimed as a founder of modern-day linguistics—and semiology, for that matter. One of his more interesting theories is that we derive verbal meaning not directly from words or larger units in themselves, but through minimal differences in the structures of language, such as minimal differences in sounds (phonemes). So, by changing a single sound in a specific word, the meaning is altered—as we can see in a word pair such as cat and hat, where a difference in their initial sounds results in different concepts. This simple contrastive method demonstrates, Saussure claimed, that words have no intrinsic meaning in themselves, but in differential relation to other words in the system of language.

For Saussure, verbal meaning is entirely internal and relational, determined by the interdependent structures of the system of language, which he called langue, rather than by a direct connection of words or other verbal structures to the external world. In other words, language links thoughts and sounds together in systemic ways, and especially through differences such as those evident in the cat-hat minimal pair, which produce what we commonly call "meaning."

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