Hackery

The Joy of Scripting

Sat 28 Mar 2009

Was going home on the train with Hannah (8) this afternoon, and she says, "Dad, what's the longest word you can make without using any letters with tails or stalks?". "Do you really want to know?", I asked, and whipping out the trusty laptop, we had an answer within a couple of train stops:

egrep -v '[A-Zbdfghjklpqty]' /usr/share/dict/words | \
perl -nle 'chomp; push @words, $_;
  END { @words = sort { length($b) cmp length($a) } @words;
        print join "\n", @words[0 .. 9] }'

noncarnivorousness
nonceremoniousness
overcensoriousness
carnivorousnesses
noncensoriousness
nonsuccessiveness
overconsciousness
semiconsciousness
unacrimoniousness
uncarnivorousness

Now I just need to teach her how to do that.