Elsewhere on the Internet: Wordnik.com Secret Word Game!

Hey!

Every Wednesday morning starting around 9:30am, @Wordnik gives out clues for a secret word on wordnik.com that has a pronounciation by "hap_e_wordnik" (see screen shot below). They give out 3 or 4 clues, each of which describes a different definition that the uncommon or obsolete word has. As soon as someone gets the right word, the game ends. If no one gets it by the end of the clues, they give a *BONUS CLUE* which usually has quotations around letters, meaning the word is an anagram of those letters.



Today's bonus clue included the quoted letters "new lid" which I anagrammed into the correct answer! I've been able to do the final sudden-death anagram part before, but always sent my response after one or more people had already figured it out. This week, I was the first! I won! YAYYYYYYYYYYYYY!



They will be mailing a prize to me which was previously secret and unknown to me, but now I will reveal it! (I hope that's okay)

It's a notebook with wordnik.com and other words on the cover! It's so cute. It's going to be so cute I won't feel worthy to put my little lists in it, but I will do it anyway.



Thanks, Wordnik! I feel so nifty now. <3

Side Project: Periodic Symbol Words

Once upon a time I fell deeply in love with the periodic elements, the table, Dmitri Mendeleev, the symbols, everything. I have several other side projects that involve the elements, but this little one comes from the fact that I once sat in a classroom to the right of center so that I was right in front of a poster of the elements, not the teacher. It made me remember that years before I had tried to make as many dirty words as I could out of the periodic symbols. Anyway, at one point I had a philosophy class in this clasroom and I spelled FEuErBaCH which looks impressive.

Recently I started collecting this list of words that can be spelled with the element symbols on wordnik under the tag "periodic symbol words."

I also recently found a seller on etsy.com who seems to specialize in element-related jewelry named ShopGibberish.

Anyway, this is a running interest in my life, and during these recent events it occurred to me that it is possible to spell the names of elements with symbols from other elements (sometimes using the symbol of the element itself, which is fine) The challenge is that most elements end in "-um" and that is not a possibly combination in the symbols. In the end, I was able to create 10/118 elements out of symbols. Here is my proof:

Word Game: License to Spell

(That is a terrible name for this game. I've been trying to think of a more graceful one for weeks.)


There is a game I have created that I often play as a passenger on the roads of life. The game involves license plates and spelling but not anagrams. (It doesn't work with vanity plates like the one above that I came up with and I thought was hilarious when I was younger.) (It is also hilarious now.)

So basically, on most license plates there is a series of 3 letters like this:


You take the 3 letters, keep them in order, and try to come up with as many words as possible that have those letters in that order. They can be word-initial, they can be together or separate, but they must stay in that order. So for the above example, words could be have these possible orders: BQU_, _BQU, B_QU_, _B_Q_U, ___B___QU___, etc. Bequeath, bezique (it's a card game), Albuquerque, Bisquick... That combination is pretty hard, actually, my list is here: BQU.

You can use proper names, you can use company names, you can use hyphenated words, and compound words. If you're really stuck you can use a two-word phrase like "be quiet" just so you can get some satisfaction at having found at least one solution. It's not really about points, or length. Some of the shortest words are quite elegant, but the long ones can be impressive purely for their size.

The purpose of the game is to keep your brain occupied during silent two-person car trips, or to have something to do with the driver that engages them but also keeps their eyes on the road. When it's a really good combination, I try to remember them and make it a tag on wordnik.com. I haven't done that so much, but I'm working on it.

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You can also play this game in a stationary position, you just need 3 letters. The simplest way to randomly choose 3 letters is to ask someone in the room for their initials, or think of the full name of a famous person. I have made a list using my own initials, BMH. You can see the kind of liberties I took for the sake of creating a longer list.

I just asked a housemate for his initials, which are TGG, which seems to require an "ing" nearly every time to get all three of those letters in together. At first, I thought he said TTG, so I made a list of those, too.

Anyway, feel free to play. Some are easy and endless, some are impossibly hard, but most of them are a good combination of low-hanging fruit and satisfying brain teasers. If you want clarification on rules, or have a suggestion of how to take the game to the next level, lemme know.

Causing More Mischief on Wordnik

Oh hello. I've been up to no good, spending my time watching internet television and flipping around wordnik pages as I please.

First of all, I continue tagging more things in im-pure non-linguist approved format.... like vcvccv.


CH SOUNDS LIKE K
On my birthday, a great new game was invented because of conflicting pronunciation of the word chimera. Thus began a weeklong game of one-upmanship, trying to think of more new words that use ch in a word with a k sound. Most are Greek. In our game we could only use a root word once, so variations on 'chronology' did not count as new additions, unless they were really awesome. Loch is technically a different guttural sound, but for the purposes of a light-hearted list-based game, I hope I can be forgiven. Please add as you like. I tried to remember all the ones I could, but there were a lot. The list so far is HERE.


RH
When I ran out of "ch with a k sound" words, my mind looked for more fun letter combinations to play with, and I soon realized that there are not many words that have R and H next to each other. Rhino, rhythm, rhombus, rheumatoid, the list does not go on for very long. But then! An extension was made, realizing that R and H are often in the middle of words, at the junction between the two parts of a compound word. neighboRHood. supeRHero. waRHorse. Fun times, the list I started is HERE. You may notice Spiderham on the list, which was a children's comic book series that my family owns and I read as a child. You can find him immediately on Google Images, so I think it's pretty legit.


ONE-DOLLAR WORDS
Once upon a time in elementary school, I hated math. I still hate math. My math teacher said we could get a free pass on doing homework if we could bring in an example of a $1.00 word. The system is based off of A=1, B=2, J=10, T=20, Z=26. You add all the letters up and if they equal 100, that's a dollar word. I super-sponge absorbed that system into my brain, and spent the next month of my life with a calculator at the ready, plugging in any and all words i could think of that might work. Pumpkin, elephant, wizards, hamburger, excellent. I loved them. It turns out the internet has taken the thinking out of the list, and you can find them all in one nice place called Math Lair. It lists 660 words, I entered in about a third of them while I was watching internet television this evening. It made me happy. Here's the list so far.


BH
BH are my initials, and B next to an H is not common. And it looks weird, and so far I just have Clubhouse. There must be others. I found a lot of -house words by looking through the font catalog at House Industries. I got a catalog from them in the mail once, very well designed. I believe I had them address it to bOb fencepost, which was my nom de internet at the time. Brilliant.

DH
Another uncommon and strange looking letter order. This one I also found through hunting House's fonts, but with a little more success. DHarma, maDHouse, roaDHouse, birDHouse.

Happy tagging, everybody. Please join in and play.

I'm Pretty Sure I Just Did Something Awesome

I haven't done anything today, unless you count the hundreds of words I've tagged on Wordnik.com in an attempt to create a foundation for ... something.

Basically, I go to an entry for a word. I look at how the word is spelled. I tag the word based on the pattern it has of consonants and vowels. Consonant is c, vowel is v. Panda is "cvccv". Panther is "cvcccvc". That's it.

The beauty of is is when you spend your whole day doing this, your job is basically to 'think of all the words in English" and then tag them with their consonant/vowel pattern. Some of the combinations point out obvious connections between fight, right, light, might, etc, but other words in the 'cvccc' pattern include birth, waltz, world, and sixth. Unexpected, neh?

I'm sure that a program could be written fairly easily to accomplish this task in minutes, but I had kind of a blast doing it manually. Actually, this blog is taking forever because every word I type here I want to go and tag on wordnik.

As I said, I'm not sure of the practical application of this. Making the connections may be the entire purpose. I mean, you can deduce that 'deer' and bead' have the same pattern of cvvc, (one of the most popular ones, and therefore one I have not been tagging as much). It's the strange combinations that seem worth making, and I'm happy to make this strong foundation. My favorite series of words is 'vccvcvcv' which currently has: advocate, antelope, envelope, escalate, and ominivore.

A while ago, I brainstormed about what online dictionaries could offer that paper ones cannot, specifically because of Erin McKean's very smart but understandable TED Talk where she explains the "ham butt problem." There could be so many more features than we are used to settling for. Wordnik already links to Flickr, and provides etymologies as well as popularity charts on the right side, explaining when a word has come in and out of the language. Pretty sweet stuff.

For some reason, I made an example page of what I thought an online definition page should look like, and included this function. In my example, it was apple, which it turns out has the very strange combination of 'vcccv.' It took a long time to match up any other words with that pattern but now there are 5.

Anyway... YOU TOO CAN ADD TO THIS NEW TAGGING EXPERIMENT!

Some caveats when tagging and searching for tagged words on Wordnik:
1. I spent a lot of time on this today but I'm only one person. Anyone can add tags by creating their own free little account. Please add them if you think they should be there.
2. I started out just doing 4, 5, and 6 letter words, eventually expanding out to 3-letter and 7-12 letter words. Therefore, if they are 4, 5, or 6 letters long, it's more likely there will be a larger database of words to compare it to.
3. For some reason today I'm having trouble deciding whether the Y in KEY should be a vowel or a consonant, so I tagged it for both 'cvv' and 'cvc.'
4. So far I haven't done any hyphenated words, but I'm sure they will fall into place easily.

Things I Discovered in 2009: Websites

1. Twitter
I don't advocate anyone's use of Twitter but my own. For me, it's the perfect combination of 'things I need to say outloud for the record' and 'things I don't want to bother a specific person about' without the vulnerability of Facebook where everyone from my entire life can see my most recent anxiety attack or third-panda-plural admonishment of myself.

2. Kingdom of Loathing
Resham told me about this pun-filled online game. It's pretty stupid, but it's funny enough that you don't mind having to spend all of your adventures trying to level up, because you can drink alcohol and gain a lot of them back. It was a good way to pass the time. I think I had the most fun naming my familiars: (Polaris Bear the Star Starfish being the best.)

So now i'm a level 16 Accordian Thief and there's some greater thing that I could do, but I think I'm done with it.

3. F My Life
My brother sent me this link the day after a breakup, and it felt so good to be surrounded by misery. Nowadays when I go to the site, it is more of a cringing awkward painful experience, everybody going through so much unholy disgusting trauma, but it's still a better site than GivesMeHope which drowns me in its sappiness.

4. Nerd Boyfriend
Famous smart nerdy guys and the clothes they wore. Some of them are particularly inspired. Makes you think of famous people as normal people, but also eccentric in their fashion choices, or just clearly from another era.


5. Wordnik
I need to loiter around this site a little more, but I have high hopes for it as a progressive innovative online dictionary, because Erin McKean is involved in it, and she wore a dress at TED that I wish I owned, and I wrote to her and she emailed me back. TWICE.

6. The Sartorialist
I wish I was consistently fashionable and lived in a city where this photographer would go. I am so jealous of nearly everyone on this site, they look so awesome like they are going somewhere important, but they did not know at the beginning of the day that this photoshoot might happen.

I Joined Wordnik

Last night I joined wordnik.com as TankHughes. I favorited 50 words, realizing how many words on my happy word list are not in English.

I hope to start tagging words I like, and creating categories for interesting words like 'strengths' the longest word with only one vowel. longest_word_with_one_vowel, one_vowel, word_records ?

More to come. Could not see a direct way to volunteer to be helpful to the site, so I'll just try some things on my own before reaching out officially.