: New: phraser, a word list generator

When you construct word puzzles, it's good to have a nice list of words to work with. Over the last several weeks, I've been tinkering on and off to build phraser, a tool that chugs through wiki data, Google Ngrams data, and text files to find (and rank) lovely words and phrases for use in puzzles.

Word list enthusiasts will quickly determine that phraser ripped of was inspired by Nutrimatic, which uses a similarly-but-differently generated list to swiftly find, say, anagrams for YESDIPLOMAS. Why not tweak Nutrimatic to do what I want? Well, I couldn't get it to build. (I did before! I think maybe a library non-backwards-compatibly updated since then? I didn't really try to hard to figure out what was going on because…) And I wanted an excuse to practice programming in Go. So, rather than hurt my brain figuring out how to get Nutrimatic building, I wrote a new program in Go.

So, anyhow, a program. And a big list of words. And a list of phrases which I should probably download onto my puzzling laptop sometime between now and the next MIT Mystery Hunt.

Tags: puzzle scene programming words

lahosken@gmail.com
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