In a prehistoric time (Id est: Prior to computers) or shortly afterwards in SciAm, Martin Gardner described an interesting dictionary & posed questions relating to it. At the time of the article or perhaps later, I had access to a computer & considered creating his dictionary. I decided that keying in of the data was too formidable. I am considering creating such a dictionary now, expecting to find a pertinent list of words. Any links would be appreciated. Following are details of his dictionary (paraphrase, not an actual quote). Some of Gardner’s questions (also paraphrases) I think Gardner had several more questions. If anyone has a pertinent intersting question, please Post it. BTW: Martin Gardner’s column (Mathematical Games) was often fascinating. In an April issue he posted circa 5 New & startling discoveries. I knew that one or two were erroneous & knew the column was in honor of April Fools Day. The others I did not recognize as invalid, but assumed they were. I wondered if there were readers who accepted all of the so called discoveries as valid.
That's the only one of your questions that might not be too difficult to answer. "Casaba," (the melon) comes out as aaabcs. That seems pretty hard to beat, but I suppose when you get into longer words, you're going to find ones with five or six A's.
At the time Martin Gardner described the dictionary in Scientific American, there were no computerized dictionaries. He proposed it as a source of interesting linguistic questions, some of which he mentioned in his column. In the absence of the dictionary described, some of the questions were difficult to answer & it might have been almost impossible to verify that plausible answers were correct. At the time, tutu was not in my vocabulary & I was certain that sty was the last word in that dictionary, excluding proper names like Tut. As mentioned in my previous Post, act has its letters in alphabetical order. One of the questions was: BTW: I wonder if such a dictionary is available. Since personal computers became powerful with lots of memory & high capacity hard disks, I have often considered creating such a dictionary.,
Well, i suppose it's not realy about such a dictionary being available, but lists(as you mentioned) and some programming to put the words in the order(s) you want them to. One of the bigger problems you 'll walk into i suppose, is finding a list, making a programme to rearrange the words, then find another, completer list in a different format. (i suggest creating a tool that will strip any list into it's most basic form, then using the actual program to, umm, simulate the dictionary)
