Larry Hosken: New: Tag: words

The Hearst Newspapers News-sites, no doubt jealous of the NYT's puzzle section, have launched their own syndicated puzzle page, Puzzmo. Each day there's a cool mini-crossword from the AVCX folks and some other puzzles. (I don't think you need to subscribe to a Hearst news-site to play the puzzles. When I tried visiting in Incognito just now, it let me get started on the crossword. To play some of their "experimental" and "bonus" puzzles, you need to join Puzzmo; as near as I can tell, that's separate from being a Hearst news-site subscriber, maybe?)

I got mad at a couple of their word puzzles because they leaned on some obscure words. E.g., I got stuck on a Typeshift puzzle and asked for a hint. The hint told me I should have used the word motlier. Motlier. As in "Look at that motley fool and the motlier fool next to him," I guess. I didn't want to have to use a desperate-Scrabble-ploy word to solve a puzzle.

I enjoyed solving the clever crosswords. I wasn't having fun solving the Typeshift and Wordbind puzzles, knowing that my scores would always be trounced by folks who could stomach using words like motlier. (Scrabble champs would no doubt point out that the real problem is that I'm unwilling to put in the work to memorize those weird words. Anyhow.)

Instead, I wrote a couple of little computer programs to solve those puzzles for me. That was fun. I set them up to favor using actual-words-that-people-use; but fall back to words-never-uttered-outside-a-Scrabble-board.

two computer windows next to each other. On the left a browser window shows the Puzzmo site, zoomed in on a Wordbind puzzle. On the right, a computer command line shows someone using a program called wordbind.py to cheat ahem I mean suggest words to use in the puzzle; it suggests using the ahem word backstamped.

Unfortunately solving those puzzles still isn't fun, even with the helper programs… So I stopped. But I still visit the site each day for the cool crossword.

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I made some more word ladder memory drill web pages; and tweaked the computer program I use to make them to be not so San Francisco street-specific. Several days ago, I made a San Francisco street n...

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Animals drawn using the letterforms of their words. Sidewalk chalk art in San Francisco at Judah & 20th, sadly faded by the time I saw it. ...

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This morning, I spotted a van from local plumbing company Chosen Rooter & Plumbing; painted on the side of their van was their logo: They tease us by narrowly avoiding a naughty word in the...

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I updated the lists of "popular" phrases and words over on the phraser page. These new lists have fresh data from Wikipedia and some other wikis. Perhaps making the biggest difference between this up...

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April is National Poetry Month. Today is April Fool's Day. I had an idea for something fun to do today, but ended up getting pranked by the English language instead. Since I recently figured out ho...

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I'm reading press releases about the Beagle Brigade Act, which would set up a center to train beagles to detect prohibited agricultural items in international mail and the baggage of international tr...

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rephrased Phraser word+phrase lists I updated the scored word and phrase lists over at the phraser page, using data from a recent copies of Wikipedia and other wikis. Soon after I updated them, I saw that my over-enthusiastic tool tha...

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Surfwords is an intense word game. I'm enjoying it so far… in short doses, because it's intense. ...

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phraser improvements Phraser, the tool for generating word+phrase lists useful for solving+designing puzzles, is now smarter when reading crossword constructor dictionaries. Thus, hundreds of thousands of words+phrases g...

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I've had a good time playing the word puzzle game Cell Tower at https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/ ...

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Thank you Google Books for clearing up the burning questions on common English usage, e.g. is there a space in "backasswards"? (Answer: sometimes, but mostly no.) I usually say "bass ackwards" b...

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I updated the big ol' list of words and the big ol' list of phrases on the Phraser page. A couple of months back, I noticed that The Collaborative Word List Project was now free. I've used the C.W....

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I updated that Bewordled game, the one where you swap tiles to make words kinda like Bejewelled but with words. Now it looks prettier with firecracker emojis and clouds. After I updated it, it occurr...

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The Collaborative Word List Project is a darned useful resource for word puzzle constructors and now it's free.* This is a list of phrases and hand-tuned scores. Here are a few lines from the file: ...

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Daily 5-dle #0007 11 : 5&8&6&11&10 polydle.github.io/?classic/daily/5 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨⬜🟨🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜...

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Okay, now RAISE is my new Wordle starter word. As before, I am not the first to figure this out. Last night, I was measuring a starting word's quality based on how many green and yellow squares it yi...

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Update: This blog post, which superceded another blog post, has since then itself been superceded. Try to keep up. Also, my "only root words" explanation wasn't quite right. Apparently, non-root wo...

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UPDATE: This post has been superceded. I've been playing Wordle, the online game that's like a cross between Mastermind and guess-the-word. It occurred to me that the ideal "starting word" would hav...

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I got wind of a new-ish public word list for crossword constructors, the spread the word(list). So I grabbed a copy and tossed it into the big pile of data that feeds the "Phraser" phrase and word li...

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Further Bewordled I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...

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Updated "phraser" word list I updated that big ranked "phraser" word list (and also the even bigger ranked phrase list). It counts words (and phrases) from different sources than it did before. The Expanded Crossword Name Dat...

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Google Ngrams Download There's a new-to-me set of Google Ngrams (big files with frequency counts for common and not-so-common English words&phrases&word-strings): Google Ngrams Download. I mention this because when...

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I have a couple of iron-on patches but no iron. 👆 Still trying to figure out on how many levels that sentence is not ironic. ...

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"Septuple" has eight letters but "Octuple" has seven. The English language fights you at every turn. ...

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A few months back, I mentioned that I'd boosted phraser's word lists by using data from Project Gutenberg's huge stash of old books… and mentioned that I wished I'd thought to omit the non-Eng...

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big ol' text corpus Project Gutenberg is a collection of Important Works kept online. E.g., if you'd like to read Shakespeare's sonnets and don't want to schlep off to some library for a physical book (ugh), you can dow...

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The Dutch word "scheepvaart" means "maritime", not ovine flatulent whatever. ...

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Remember that list of phrases and/or that list of words in a text file handy for designing/solving word puzzles? I updated those lists again with some fresh content. While I'm here: Happy Thanksgivi...

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Huh. Neither of my senators' voicemail boxes were full this morning. Maybe I should start leaving longer messages. ...

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As previously threatened, I've updated the phrase and word lists linked from the phraser page with more modern language. E.g., podesta was the 82,350th most "common" word on the old list, but with ne...

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Remember phraser, that tool for generating puzzle-design-friendly word lists? I just updated it. I found OMDB, a big database of movie info with a public API. (Did I find it? Or did one of you tell m...

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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...

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Bird Names, part of the new gig It's an exaggeration to say that Twitter's moving from a Big-Ball-of-Mud monolithic RnR architecture to a loose confederacy of services, but after you tone down the hyperbole that's roughly what's ha...

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Book Report: Many Subtle Channels in praise of potential literature In honor of USA's Buy Nothing Day, a report on a book that I checked out of the library: Many Subtle Channels It's a book about the OuLiPo. You've probably heard of them: they're a literary cabal in...

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Speaking of "what's this kind of puzzle called?", what is "Put together the letter-triples ION ISS NSM TRA to form a word"? It's kind of an anagram, but easier since you've got three triples instead ...

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Link: Ranking Wikipedia Pages This puzzle nerd has ideas on how to rank Wikipedia pages for notable-ness. Similar goals to Nutrimatic, but taking advantage of more data. Some of you folks might have some good ideas on things he c...

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Crossword Compiler Noob Diary Unsurprisingly, creating mediocre crossword puzzles is easy but creating good crossword puzzles is hard. Mind you, I don't feel pressured to create great crossword puzzles. For puzzlehunts, I only ne...

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Cyber-F-22 Sometime the past few years, the prefix "cyber-" changed meaning. It used to mean "high-tech". But lately, it's meant "I am trying to sell some poorly-thought-out computer crap to the USA governmen...

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Michael Agger wants a word for someone who speechifies about the future. He coined "Keynotist" but I prefer TEDifice. ...

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The voice of Wikipedia. Each article written by people writing about what they care about most. The precise language of controversies tiptoed around. The earnestness. You might think you could rob...

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Google & OpenID: discovery URL A while back, I mentioned that Google supported Opendid. There's one important detail that I had a hard time finding amidst the mountains of documentation: If the user wants to use their Google acco...

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Book Report: Alphabet Juice This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...

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Book Report: Letting Go of the Words I'm a professional technical writer and I recommend this book about writing: Letting Go of the Words. I theoretically train engineers so that they can write clearly. This book would help those peopl...

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Link: Warren Spector, Playing Word Games Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, ...

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Book Report: Ambient Findability This was not the right book for me. Rather, I was not the right person to read this book. Ambient Findability is a high-level overview, a survey of the surge of information that's coming at us, and...

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Book Report: Rainbows End It pays to increase your word power. I always thought that "hyperventilation" meant "breathing too fast", but really it means "breathing too fast and/or too deeply". I didn't know it was possible to...

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Book Report: Everything is Miscellaneous I am scheduled for HEAD & NECK SURGERY. It says so, in all-capital letters on the appointment form. Don't worry, mom, HEAD & NECK SURGERY is a scary-sounding category of things, but really s...

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Link: Travelers Storybook I have mentioned this before: When I was growing, I spent a fair amount of time with Bob & Kelly Wilhelm, friends of the family. Bob was and is a storyteller. I don't just mean that he can rela...

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Link: Webster's Online Dictionary Puzzle hunts were everywhere last weekend. Midnight Madness in Hot Springs. Some movie called BHAGAMBHAG set up a promo treasure hunt in Mumbai, sounds big-scale. I didn't do any of that. I have ...

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, from Seattle to Siena Some awesome folks in Seattle are contributing to their local Game community by setting up a web site with announcements and forums and stuff. Check it out. I fed their RSS feed into my reader so I...

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Publishing News Tom Manshreck is in town. Tom was living in NYC, working in publishing. There's a lot of publishing around there. Tom was working on engineering textbooks, but he still cares about the literary st...

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Not Quite Letting Go of Spring Did I mention that White Mughals mentions a doctor treating a bladder infection? And the doctor is named George Ure. Ure should totally be the root of the word "urea", though it isn't, really. Tha...

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