Words in Numbers

Give a word to a human being. Most likely, (S)he will comprehend it and use it to spur the spirit of mankind, be it be 'dream', 'dare' or any word. Give a word to a Software Engineer, (s)he will split the word into array of characters, reverse the array, play with the alphabets and feel proud of it!

Now that the context is set, when the buzz around Wordle was catching everybody's attention, the first thought that came to my mind - what a great problem of permutations & combinations. We need to pick 5 combinations of 26 repeatable characters, all within 5 attempts, using clues of presence and/or positions of the mentioned characters!

Little bit of googling enlightened me that total number of words are about 1/3 to 1/2 a million, based on how you define boundaries of word in terms of usage, type, or variations. I wanted to get hand onto "all" the list of words that I can "programmatically" read, which means Oxford and Cambridge type of dictionaries are of no good. Then I stumbled upon GitHub's english-words, thanks to the 22 contributors.

Hold my beer! I have the txt file, power of PowerShell scripting and elegance of Power BI reports. So, what's stopping? Lets get counting!!

Total Words with a given count of alphabets

Example: Words with 3 count of alphabets: map, use, eco, red, rio. Words with 5 count of alphabets: extra, hippa, elses, taper, beige. Words with 15 count of alphabets: recollectedness, macrosporophore, anomalocephalus, unpendulousness, pleocrystalline. Not surprisingly, the count of alphabets formed a nice bell curve. What came as surprise to me was, many words were with 9 alphabets, while I was expecting the peak to be 4-ish.

In any case, to be master in Wordle, you just need to memorize about 16,000 words, and not about half a million!

Total Words beginning and ending with a given alphabet

It did not surprise me that many words were starting with "s", "a" or ending with "s", "y", "e". But it was quite amusing to see that there are only 30 words ending with "j" , "q" in entire universe of words!

Total Words having a given count of Vowels

Most of the words seem to have either 3 or 4 vowels in them. But there are only 11 words with 11 vowels and just 1 word with 12 vowels.

Words with 11 vowels: pseudointernationalistic, zoologicoarchaeologist, overindividualization . The one and only word with 12 alphabets grabbed my attention, which is humuhumunukunukuapuaa . How to pronounce it? - don't worry, there is a wonderful video out there.

Words with and without a vowel

Out of the 1/3 million words out there, at least one vowel is present in staggering 99.76% of the words. And just miniscule percentage of 0.24, which is 1/4th of 1 percent are without any vowel in them. So, just 871 words are without any vowels in them. Example: gym, hymns, gypsy, rhythms, tsktsk.

I am sure there are many other attributes of words that may interest us. Please let me know what type of data you are looking for. Would be more than happy to accommodate it.

Till then, have fun with words in numbers!