[HN Gopher] The longest word you can type on the first row
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       The longest word you can type on the first row
        
       Author : nafnlj
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2023-08-24 21:29 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (rubenerd.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (rubenerd.com)
        
       | seabass-labrax wrote:
       | You might find the... 'translation'[1] of Genesis 1 using only
       | keys on the Colemak home row interesting:                 In the
       | start The One has risen the stars and the earth.            The
       | earth had no order, and nothin' resided there; and shade resided
       | on the nonendin' 'neath. And The One rided on the seas.
       | Then The One said: "I desire it to shine"; and it shone.
       | And The One had seen the shine, that it's neat; and The One
       | sorted the shine on one side, and the shade on the other.
       | The One then denoted the shine and the shade. So the nite and the
       | shine that are date no. one had ended.
       | 
       | [1]: https://colemak.com/Fun
        
         | schoen wrote:
         | If you enjoy that, you might also enjoy this version that I
         | wrote
         | 
         | https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite...
         | 
         | It was inspired by these versions:
         | 
         | https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...
         | 
         | https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | Germans would type on a QWERTZ keyboard (Z and Y are swapped).
       | This may theoretically considerably open up the space of possible
       | top-row-only German words, as Z is very common in German
       | (especially after T).
        
         | allendoerfer wrote:
         | Which is exactly why the two letters are swapped.
        
       | DylanDmitri wrote:
       | Related, is there a high quality plaintext dictionary file for
       | running similar searches? I've spent several hours but couldn't
       | find one that's both comprehensive and accurate.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/wordlist
        
         | koolba wrote:
         | Dictionary or word list?
         | 
         | /usr/share/dict/words is always destination zero for words.
        
         | mminer237 wrote:
         | https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words_alph...
        
         | JoshTriplett wrote:
         | I'd recommend the SCOWL wordlist, which also has usage data (so
         | you can decide how rare of words you want to include).
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | What are your rules for what counts as a "word"? If you go with
         | the basic scrabble rules (i.e. nothing that would be
         | capitalized or punctuated) then YAWL[1] is pretty good, with
         | the downside being the most recent version I know of is from
         | 2008.
         | 
         | FYI, rupturewort is the sole 11-letter word answer to TFA in
         | YAWL; found using:                   grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$'
         | word.list |while read -r line; do echo "${#line} ${line}"; done
         | |sort -n | tail
         | 
         | 1: https://github.com/elasticdog/yawl
        
         | praash wrote:
         | Some common Linux distributions have packages that provide word
         | list files to /usr/share/dict/ in several languages. It's
         | likely for English files to be preinstalled. I've had a plenty
         | of fun practising regex and pipes with these word lists!
        
       | suzzer99 wrote:
       | The Welsh would love this game. Trywytypryrwy
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | One does wonder who dared Liam Dutton to do this:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM
        
       | probably_wrong wrote:
       | If you are interested in full sentences there's a "What if?" [1]
       | that explains how to generate sentences using a single row of
       | your keyboard (with a link to code [2]) or stranger stuff like
       | "We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest".
       | 
       | [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/75/
       | 
       | [2] https://xkcd.com/markov.py.txt
        
       | eitally wrote:
       | A number of years ago I solved a minor but repetitive QoL problem
       | I had, and created a password I could type with just my left
       | hand. It started as 8 characters, but I now have variants with as
       | many as 15 characters. Not a word, or even words strung together,
       | but it is so nice being able to just type it with one hand.
        
       | bnjmn wrote:
       | On any macOS computer (or replace /usr/share/dict/words with your
       | own word list):                 grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$'
       | /usr/share/dict/words | \       awk '{ print length(), $0 }' | \
       | sort -n
        
         | tedunangst wrote:
         | Knuth vs McIlroy all over again.
        
         | travisgriggs wrote:
         | Nice.
         | 
         | Middle/Second row result is
         | 
         | 8 flagfall "Flagfall, or flag fall, is a common Australian
         | expression for a fixed start fee, especially in the taxi,
         | haulage, railway, and toll road industries."
         | 
         | 8 galagala "A name in the Philippine Islands of Dammara
         | Philippinensis, a coniferous tree yielding dammar-resin."
         | 
         | Lower/Third Row: - None
         | 
         | There are no vowels on the bottom row. So no words. I've been
         | typing at ~ 50wpm for 30 years, and I don't think I'd ever
         | actually consciously recognized this fact about the bottom row.
         | 
         | (standard US keyboard layout)
        
           | JoshTriplett wrote:
           | For QWERTY, I found two nine-letter words using only the
           | middle row: halakhahs and haggadahs.
           | 
           | And yeah, nothing in the bottom row other than acronyms and
           | similar pseudo-words.
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | Just use https://www.visca.com/regexdict/
        
         | juujian wrote:
         | Works for Ubuntu, too. My Colemak self can only get fluffy (6)
         | from the front row, that's the longest word. Middle row really
         | shines though, I can get hardheartedness (15) or assassinations
         | (14).
        
           | tiltowait wrote:
           | Interesting that your dictionary doesn't have
           | "tenderheartedness", which is two letters longer.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | seabass-labrax wrote:
           | Gulp, fluffy puppy pug! Yup. Fly, ugly pup, fly.
           | 
           | I note that hardheartedness and hotheadedness threaten the
           | darnedest nonstandard assassinations. Such sordidness!
        
       | SethTro wrote:
       | For Dvorak with a little assist from unix
       | 
       | First row
       | 
       | $ awk '/^[,.pyfgcrl] _$ / { print length(), $0 }'
       | /usr/share/dict/words | sort -nr | head
       | 
       | 3 pry / ply / fry / cry
       | 
       | Second row
       | 
       | $ awk '/^[aoeuidhtns]_$/ { print length(), $0 }'
       | /usr/share/dict/words | sort -nr | head
       | 
       | 15 tendentiousness
       | 
       | 14 assassinations
       | 
       | 13 instantaneous
       | 
       | 13 insidiousness
       | 
       | Third row
       | 
       | $ awk '/^[;qjkxbmwvz]*$/ { print length(), $0 }'
       | /usr/share/dict/words | sort -nr | head
       | 
       | 4 xxxv
       | 
       | 3 xxx
       | 
       | 3 xxv
       | 
       | 2 xx
        
         | rwl4 wrote:
         | Hmm. My Mac shows these:
         | 
         | [...] 15 sententiousness 15 sinuatodentated 15 soundheadedness
         | 15 tendentiousness 15 uninitiatedness 16 antisensuousness 16
         | ostentatiousness 17 dissentaneousness 17 instantaneousness 18
         | unostentatiousness
        
         | Nekhrimah wrote:
         | Not sure about that third row, the "A" is in the second row.
        
           | SethTro wrote:
           | Awkward, now the third now doesn't return anything
           | 
           | $ awk '/^[;qjkxbmwvz]*$/ { print length(), $0 }'
           | /usr/share/dict/words | sort -nr | head 4 xxxv 3 xxx 3 xxv 2
           | xx 2 xv
        
             | Nekhrimah wrote:
             | With those letters, not surprised!
        
       | neilk wrote:
       | I think we can do better than 11 characters!
       | 
       | I happen to have a corpus which includes pretty much every word
       | ever written in a book, including many misspelled,
       | mistranscribed, or otherwise non-dictionary words.
       | 
       | After eliminating nonsense, non-English, or other mistakes, I
       | think the real winner, coming it at 12 characters, is:
       | teetertotter
       | 
       | That's a relatively common word. Even though it's usually seen
       | hyphenated, the unhyphenated form is recognized by all the online
       | dictionaries I found.
       | 
       | ----
       | 
       | And some other candidates, just for fun, in the 13 or 12
       | character range:                   proproprietor
       | priorityqueue         reporterette         preprototype
       | 
       | "proproprietor" seems more like a misspelling. Should have a
       | hyphen, or be two words.
       | 
       | "priorityqueue" is of course familiar to hackers here, but is
       | more of a jargon term, and is only concatenated due to appearing
       | in source code. Invariably it's two words when actually written
       | out.
       | 
       | "reporterette" is antique, but appeared in a NYTimes headline as
       | late as 2018 - the author reflected on her career, including
       | sexist epithets.
       | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/opinion/george-hw-bush-ma...
       | 
       | "preprototype" is used exactly as is, in lots of scientific
       | papers, up to the current day. That's a pretty good one too, and
       | could be a tie for "teetertotter", but it's verging on jargon.
        
       | susam wrote:
       | On macOS version 12.1 Monterey:                 $ grep
       | '^[qwertyuiop]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{print length,
       | $0}' | sort -rn | head       11 rupturewort       11 proterotype
       | 11 proprietory       10 typewriter       10 tetterwort       10
       | repetitory       10 repertoire       10 proprietor       10
       | pretorture       10 prerequire
       | 
       | On Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye):                 $ grep
       | '^[qwertyuiop]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{print length,
       | $0}' | sort -rn | head       10 typewriter       10 repertoire
       | 10 proprietor       10 perpetuity       9 typewrote       9
       | typewrite       9 territory       9 repertory       9 puppeteer
       | 9 prototype
        
         | codetrotter wrote:
         | FreeBSD 13.2                   % grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$'
         | /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -rn |
         | head              11 rupturewort         11 proterotype
         | 11 proprietory         10 typewriter         10 tetterwort
         | 10 repetitory         10 repertoire         10 proprietor
         | 10 pretorture         10 prerequire
         | 
         | So it seems that in addition to having parts of its kernel
         | based on FreeBSD, there is also a lot of similarities in the
         | wordlist at /usr/share/dict/words of macOS to that of FreeBSD
         | :) perhaps even the same?
        
           | p1mrx wrote:
           | MS-DOS 6.22                   C:\>grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$'
           | /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -rn |
           | head         Bad command or file name         Bad command or
           | file name         SORT: Too many parameters         Bad
           | command or file name
        
         | JoshTriplett wrote:
         | For Debian, try installing one of the larger wordlists, such as
         | wamerican-huge or wbritish-huge; those have "rupturewort".
        
       | kristopolous wrote:
       | Here's something you may not know, the *-insane dictionaries,
       | which are giant, are functions of OCR output and are known to
       | contain lots of errors.
       | 
       | I found a few earlier this year and I was going to file a bug so
       | I did some research to find out this is a known and expected
       | behavior.
       | 
       | If the computer say reads stubborn as stubbum, the smaller
       | dictionaries are the ones that have cross checked and filtered
       | those out. The insane ones do not. It's a good name. "Lack of
       | sanity checks"
       | 
       | Here's an example word I found, "suabilities". You'll find it
       | only on wordlist sites that used this wordlist and I guess, now
       | here.
        
         | schoen wrote:
         | I've used the insane dictionaries a number of times for puzzle
         | stuff and I never knew that they were derived from OCR output.
         | Thanks for mentioning that!
        
         | colinchartier wrote:
         | Reminds me of the ghost Unicode character saga:
         | https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
        
       | kragen wrote:
       | for this kind of thing, aside from of course
       | /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/share/dict/spanish, i commonly use
       | a word list sorted by occurrences in the british national corpus
       | which i keep at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/wordlist
       | 
       | this allows you to, among other things, tune the
       | comprehensiveness/accuracy tradeoff to your liking for a
       | particular task by cutting the list off at a given point
       | 
       | probably i should download the google 1-grams now that i have a
       | bigger disk
       | 
       | anyway                  $ grep ' [qwertyuiop]*$' ~/wordlist |
       | perl -lane 'print length $F[1], " $F[1]"' | sort -n
       | 
       | indeed suggests only                   10 perpetuity         10
       | proprietor         10 repertoire         10 typewriter
       | 
       | possibly a more practical problem is, what are the most common
       | words you can type entirely with the left hand while your other
       | hand is on the mouse+; 'redraw' was a significant one with early
       | versions of autocad                   $ grep '
       | [qwertasdfgzxcvb]*$' ~/wordlist | head         2150885 a
       | 923975 was         664780 be         478178 at         470949 are
       | 
       | uh that's somewhat boring                   $ grep '
       | [qwertasdfgzxcvb]*$' ~/wordlist | perl -ane 'print "$F[1] " if
       | length $F[1] > 6' | fmt | head         greater started effects
       | address average regarded created treated affected
       | greatest streets readers afterwards referred database degrees
       | dressed         arrested attract decades attracted addressed
       | stressed stewart awarded         targets estates abstract
       | assessed terrace reserve reverse barbara reserves         careers
       | defeated dragged grabbed creates greeted secrets bastard extract
       | edwards detected deserve affects traders adverse retreat
       | addresses rewards         aggregate decrease scattered breasts
       | referee databases deserted actress         debates deserves
       | reversed deserved defects reserved fastest rewarded
       | steward battered erected deceased exaggerated cassette exceeded
       | servers         warfare extracts drawers stresses asserted
       | reacted sweater regards stabbed
       | 
       | that's a bit better. how about words you can type alternating the
       | two hands, so you can type faster                   $ egrep ' [^q
       | wertasdfgzxcvb]?([qwertasdfgzxcvb][^qwertasdfgzxcvb])*[qwertasdfg
       | zxcvb]?$' ~/wordlist | perl -ane 'print "$F[1] " if length $F[1]
       | > 6' | fmt | head -4         problem problems england chairman
       | alright element ancient visible penalty         quantity visitor
       | signals amendment claudia bicycle authentic antibody
       | malaysia naughty dickens entitlement antique paisley rituals
       | auditor         endowment blanche chairmen siemens chaotic
       | suspend uruguay mcleish
       | 
       | it's a curious experience to touch-type a sequence of these words
       | because after a while you notice that something is unusual. the
       | one-handed words are a bit more conspicuous. try typing 'a better
       | career award as edward created database facts after we agreed we
       | stared at dear steve' into the comment box, it's super weird
       | 
       | of course the bnc has some built-in biases which dramatically
       | understate the frequency of certain words                   $
       | grep fuck ~/wordlist         2568 fucking         1236 fuck
       | 158 fucked         53 fucker         23 fucks         20 fuckers
       | 13 motherfucker         5 motherfuckers         5 fuckin
       | 
       | 'ngl' appears but only 5 times. 'yeet' doesn't occur at all
       | 
       | ______
       | 
       | + mouse?
        
         | ben0x539 wrote:
         | I wonder how fast you could get at typing everything onehanded
         | with some modifier key that mirrors the keyboard. Right hand is
         | probably more useful there.
        
           | kragen wrote:
           | i did try that by patching my x server 21 years ago
           | 
           | http://web.archive.org/web/20090727071756/http://lists.canon.
           | ..
           | 
           | my hack was kind of half-assed but worked well enough that i
           | was convinced that it was a bad idea, so i decided not to do
           | the second buttock
        
             | ben0x539 wrote:
             | That's sick, thanks for sharing!
        
               | kragen wrote:
               | thanks i think
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | That's getting close to a chording keyboard which can br very
           | fast.
        
             | kragen wrote:
             | it's sort of the opposite
             | 
             | the critical path for fast typing is the precision with
             | which you can synchronize the motions of different fingers,
             | and in particular different hands; if keydown events happen
             | in the wrong order, you start to get tranpsosition erorrs
             | 
             | chording keyboards don't care in which order the keys in
             | the chord start; they only care what the set of keys in the
             | chord is and when it ends (so they can stop looking for new
             | keys to add to the set). fast typists on chording keyboards
             | can do 300 words per minute, which is about 7 chords per
             | second, which is about as many "strokes" as a normal typist
             | on a non-chording keyboard, just with chords (producing a
             | syllable each) instead of individual keys (producing a
             | letter each)
             | 
             | adding a required modifier key that has to happen before a
             | keystroke, and end before the next keystroke, is the
             | opposite; it adds _more_ things you have to sequence
             | correctly. in the half-keyboard patch case, in particular,
             | it adds 50% more things. this slows down your typing by
             | about a third
        
       | jedberg wrote:
       | > I imagine German has some epic words that can be written in
       | just the first row.
       | 
       | My understanding of German grammar is that words can be of
       | infinite length since they allow unlimited compounding. But they
       | also have a language authority that makes words official, and the
       | current longest is 68 letters.
       | 
       | So it would indeed be an interesting exercise in German.
        
       | nbush wrote:
       | This post finally got me to dig back up the ultimate word trivia
       | website, valiantly hosted on Tripod and still maintained:
       | https://jeff560.tripod.com/words1.html
        
       | mensetmanusman wrote:
       | It is lollipop for those interested in the longest for the right
       | hand.
        
         | san-fran wrote:
         | I don't know if it's true, but read that "stewardesses" is the
         | longest for the left hand
        
         | kragen wrote:
         | polyphony and homophony are both one letter longer
        
           | jimbob45 wrote:
           | Am I the only one who types 'y's with my left hand?
        
             | kragen wrote:
             | i probably do it more often than i'd like to admit but
             | officially...
        
       | contingencies wrote:
       | $ axel -n4
       | https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/latest/enwiktionary-
       | latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 && bunzip2 enwiktionary-latest-
       | pages-articles.xml.bz2 # 1.1G -> 8.1G       $ grep '<title>'
       | enwiktionary-latest-pages-articles.xml  >titles # 282M       $
       | sed 's/ *<title>//' titles |sed 's/<\/title>//' >clean-titles #
       | 126M       $ grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$' clean-titles | awk '{ print
       | length(), $0 }' | sort -nr|grep ^1[23456789]            15
       | retroproiettori  # italian <-- joint italian winner       15
       | retroproiettore  # italian <-- joint italian winner       13
       | topprioriteit    # dutch   <-- dutch winner       13
       | ripitturerete    # italian       13 retorqueretur    # latin
       | <-- joint latin winner       13 repropitietur    # latin   <--
       | joint latin winner       13 purpurroterer    # german  <-- german
       | winner       13 proterreretur    # latin   <-- joint latin winner
       | 13 perterreretur    # latin   <-- joint latin winner       13
       | perquireretur    # latin   <-- joint latin winner       12
       | teetertotter     # english <-- english winner       12
       | riproporrete     # italian       12 ripitturerei     # italian
       | 12 riotturerete     # italian       12 retorquetote     # latin
       | 12 retorquerere     # latin       12 requiriertet     # german
       | 12 requireretur     # latin       12 repropitiere     # latin
       | 12 repperiretur     # latin       12 purpurrotere     # german
       | 12 prototypique     # french  <-- french winner       12
       | proterruerit     # latin       12 proterrituro     # latin
       | 12 proterrituri     # latin       12 proterriture     # latin
       | 12 proterretote     # latin       12 proterrerere     # latin
       | 12 protereretur     # latin       12 proriperetur     # latin
       | 12 proietterete     # italian       12 priorytetowy     # polish
       | <-- joint polish winner       12 priorytetowo     # polish  <--
       | joint polish winner       12 prioriteetti     # finnish <--
       | finnish winner       12 prepotettero     # italian       12
       | portretterte     # bokmal  <-- joint bokmal winner       12
       | portretterer     # bokmal  <-- joint bokmal winner       12
       | portretteert     # dutch       12 piroetterete     # italian
       | 12 pipettiertet     # german       12 perterruerit     # latin
       | 12 perterrituro     # latin       12 perterrituri     # latin
       | 12 perterriture     # latin       12 perterretote     # latin
       | 12 perterrerere     # latin       12 perquiritote     # latin
       | 12 perquirerere     # latin       12 perpetuerete     # italian
       | 12 perpetrerete     # italian       12 perpeteretur     # latin
       | 12 perequitetur     # latin       12 iperprotetto     # italian
       | 12 iperprotetti     # italian       12 iperprotette     # italian
       | 12 eqqoqqortooq     # greenlandic <-- greenlandic winner
        
       | noxvilleza wrote:
       | I'm surprised that PROPRIETORY wasn't found in the Andrew
       | Stephens 2009 search.
        
         | svat wrote:
         | Most dictionaries list only the standard form PROPRIETARY, so
         | it is arguable whether a word list should contain
         | "PROPRIETORY": although Merriam-Webster and Wiktionary (unlike
         | most dictionaries) list it as an alternative spelling, and it
         | does occur a few times in the wild (e.g. see
         | https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=proprietory%2C...
         | for a comparison), it is not surprising that most word lists
         | leave it out. (Or, even if it occurs in a word list, Stephens
         | may have excluded it, and there is sufficient justification for
         | doing so.)
        
       | lovehashbrowns wrote:
       | I tried to do some other fun things like going row by row with
       | each row only contributing one letter and seeing what's the
       | longest word I could come up with.
       | 
       | If I start at the top row and go down, I can make TAXES but
       | couldn't think of a longer word. The third row having no vowels
       | makes it so hard.
       | 
       | Starting at the bottom row and going up, I came up with CHICKEN
       | which is delicious and neat that it ends where it started.
       | Chickens is longer but ends on the middle row which is not as
       | neat I feel like :(
        
         | JoshTriplett wrote:
         | > If I start at the top row and go down, I can make TAXES but
         | couldn't think of a longer word. The third row having no vowels
         | makes it so hard.
         | 
         | A dictionary search turned up "paxwaxes" as the longest word I
         | could find that starts in the top row and goes down, wrapping
         | around to the top every three letters.
         | 
         | > Starting at the bottom row and going up, I came up with
         | CHICKEN which is delicious and neat that it ends where it
         | started. Chickens is longer but ends on the middle row which is
         | not as neat I feel like :(
         | 
         | Chickens is indeed the longest.
         | 
         | If you start at the bottom row and go up-and-down: cataclysms,
         | or catamarans.
         | 
         | If you start at the top row and go down-and-up: escapable.
         | 
         | If you start in the middle and go down-and-up: scarabaean
         | 
         | If you start in the middle and go up-and-down, I didn't find
         | anything longer than 7 letters, and there were 39 seven-letter
         | words, including "discard", "grandpa", and "stacked".
        
       | elchief wrote:
       | how about on the left side of the keyboard? STEWARDESSES is the
       | longest i can think of
        
         | sshine wrote:
         | exaggerated       stewardesse
        
         | colecut wrote:
         | extra points for only using 2 rows
        
           | qup wrote:
           | Considering the keys, maybe you should get extra points if
           | you use all three instead.
        
       | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-25 23:01 UTC)