I wonder how long it would have taken someone to find one of those without using a script. The human mind is pretty good at word based puzzles, but that’s a very short list and a pretty wacky criteria.
I thought about it for about 5 minutes before deciding to script it, and got “fobs” and, annoyingly, dismissed “fres” as not a word.
I imagine if I had been more rigorous it wouldn’t have taken long to get all the 4 letter ones, since they all have an internal vowel, which was the obvious place to start looking.
It seems to me like you could generate the 26 pairs—an, bo, cp, etc.-- and then try to make words out of nesting those pairs (fobs is “ob” surrounded by “fs”). But the hard part is checking whether or not something is a word, and nesting is a pretty weird action unrelated to the sound or content of words.
Are there any English words with the property that if you rot13 them, they flip backwards? For example, “ly” becomes “yl,” but “ly” isn’t a word.
I wrote a check for this property for all the words in my system’s inbuilt vim dictionary and got the following list:
Rubbish Words:
er, Livy, Lyly, na, ob, re, uh
Interesting Words:
an, fans, fobs, gnat, ravine, robe, serf, tang, thug
Thanks!
I wonder how long it would have taken someone to find one of those without using a script. The human mind is pretty good at word based puzzles, but that’s a very short list and a pretty wacky criteria.
I thought about it for about 5 minutes before deciding to script it, and got “fobs” and, annoyingly, dismissed “fres” as not a word.
I imagine if I had been more rigorous it wouldn’t have taken long to get all the 4 letter ones, since they all have an internal vowel, which was the obvious place to start looking.
It seems to me like you could generate the 26 pairs—an, bo, cp, etc.-- and then try to make words out of nesting those pairs (fobs is “ob” surrounded by “fs”). But the hard part is checking whether or not something is a word, and nesting is a pretty weird action unrelated to the sound or content of words.
But now I have idea for a Scrabble-esque game...
A simple google search brings up this page, but it doesn’t have anything new.