Curtailment
A word or phrase becomes another when its last letter is removed. Example: sting(y).
The solution: LONGER = aspiring, CURTAILED = aspirin.
A curtailment may consist of more than two words, though these are rare. An obscure but dazzling example: chorizont (one who ascribes the Iliad and the Odyssey to different authors—look it up in NI2 if you don’t believe it!), C-horizon (a particular layer of soil), chorizo (a kind of spicy sausage).
In a reversed curtailment, after curtailing the first word or phrase, you reverse it to get the second. Example: stinky, knits.
In a phonetic curtailment, a word or phrase becomes another when its last sound is removed. Example: qt (as in “on the qt”), cute, queue. For discussion of what constitutes a single sound, see phonetic flats.
In a bigram curtailment, a word or phrase becomes another when its last two letters are removed. Example, ONE = satiety, TWO = Satie.
In a palindrome curtailment, a word or phrase becomes another when a palindromic sequence of three or more letters is deleted from the end. Examples: a(cidic) and mart(ini).
In a bigram palindrome curtailment, a sequence of three or more bigrams that make a palindrome is deleted from the end of a word, leaving another word. Examples: the(re)(fo)(re) and c(it)(ru)(s f)(ru)(it).