7 ms·
The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36
- bryanl 17y agoOne of the words is halloween. How fitting.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- syoutsey 17y agoI'm a little confused...why did he use base 36 instead of base 26? Aren't there only 26 letters we need to convert to numbers?
- nrr 17y agoConsider hex and base 64. Base 16 takes the first six letters from the alphabet to augment the number of available letters for representing a particular value. I guess using base 26 would make sense from a strictly alphabetic standpoint, but we've conventionally included the numbers 0-9 as part of the available letters for representation.
- muck 17y agoI guess they think words somehow include numbers
- scottjackson 17y agoFrom the looks of things, no leetspeak was included in the list, thankfully.
- cvg 17y agoThere are no numbers in English, but some real languages with latinized character sets have numbers in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sḵwxwú7mesh_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sḵwxwú7mesh_language
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zzkt 17y agoby convention in base 36, numbers can be represented by [0-9] and [a-z]. 1(36)=1(10) a(36)=10(10) and z(36)=36(10).
- MaysonL 17y agoz(36) = 35(10), actually ;-)
- mkelly 17y agoI already thought "zenith" was a fun word, and this just makes me like it even more. Yay!
- imd 17y agoI wonder if anyone will use this set of words for constrained writing.
- filosofo 17y agoRestriction? Henceforth, demonstration. You'd thought, "what person couldn't workup contrived composition?"
- ralphb 17y agoMy personal favourite: PRIMETEST But the list is surprisingly long, so not that surpring that something concerning primes would be in there.
- nrr 17y agoFERMAT is also one. :)
- yuan 17y agoMore interesting is what isn't there: so prime is not prime.
- ubernostrum 17y agoSee also: Richardian numbers.
- roundsquare 17y agoInteresting. Could be fun to combine this with distributions on word length, etc... and compare the number of primes we see to the expected number of primes (using the prime number theorem). Would be funny if we had a tendency towards prime words :)
- eru 17y agoZen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen!
- Xichekolas 17y agoIt seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.
- Hexstream 17y agoAnd yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- berntb 17y agoSigh, I thought it would be about PDP-10, the coolest assembler I've ever seen.
- nrr 17y agoIt's a shame that neither TECO nor DDT are prime. :(
- alaricsp 17y agoI set my colleages a challenge: write porn using only prime words. "WIDEST WOMB WOMAN WATCHED PET PERVERT WHIP BLINDFOLDED YIDDISH BITCH" "BAREBACKED BARD RUTTED BLINDFOLDED BITCH" "BAREBACKED BARD PULVERIZED TRUCKMAN RUTTED TORRID" "YARDMAN WHIP UNUSED WHELP, TROLLOP SUSPECTED SILKEN RUNT. PUTOUT, PARTED, LAIN. EVALUATED FETISH,EXPENDED. DISINTEREST."
- kanny96 17y agoOne-third of the prime words are past participles [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | wc 2560 2560 21156 [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | grep "ED$" | wc 843 843 7594
- CGamesPlay 17y agoSince this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.
- graywh 17y agoThen you'd just sort by length, too.
- yan 17y agoWon't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?
- harpastum 17y agoKinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3 letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any 3-digit number).