Slashdot Mirror
Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle
destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals
a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"
This should be in idle... I don't see why it should be on the front page.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand -- including one word that's even longer.
Ganz falsch!
The answer to an age old OS/2 puzzle : how many double clicks can you make on a mouse with your left big toe while typing repeatedly antidisestablishmentarianism.
Stewardess Porn is still the longest wank material you can google with your left hand
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Devertebrated
Link to the original article next time!
The longest word isn't found in the 'a much better answer' link, but rather the other one, somewhat misleadingly. The word, in case you're interested, is supposed to be 'devertebrated', though the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't recognise it.
How exactly can shorter words include a longer one?
...type http://www.uniform/ fetish.com/pics/stewardesses/ with one hand.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Apparently that's the word, but I had to read the article's comments to figure it out. Is it just me or is it NOT in the summary, article, or article linked from the article?
how can a longer word be included in a list of 2000 shorter words?
my head hurts. thanks guys!
Stewardesses is still unsurpassed on my box. (But maybe it's because "GNU's not Unix", so I have a different dictionary file.)
This has been known to logologists for years as the "best" answer to this puzzle. I believe it's from Webster's 2nd or 3rd Unabridged.
I guess the person who took the picture for the article didn't know the difference between a left and right hand...or maybe it was the person whose hand was actually photographed...or maybe it was the person who posted the article on newsvine.com...by the way, I typed this entire thing with my left foot.
databases were devertebrated after stewardesses were watered
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
From the article:
Technically, the word "reverberated" is just as long, and so is "desegregated" - but they're sometimes disqualified because they require using the past tense.
So past tense is disqualified but plural is ok? What official body is making up these rules?
According to my dict/words file, the longest word that shows up for the right hand that's actually in a dictionary that's not just my dict file is...
hillbilly
(Tied with several others, of course. Although the longest one that shows up at all, though, is phyllophyllin)
One would think that there would be some love for us with a preference for a more efficient keyboard layout...
I hit b with my right hand.
a quick grep of TWL06.txt
shows "SWEATERDRESSES" as the longest left handed word which is 15.
the command for the curious.
egrep -i "^[qwertyasdfgzxcvb]+\b" TWL06.txt |wc -L
I'm missing my right hand, you insensitive clods, and I can type any word I want to. I once typed out the longest word in the english language, the chemical name for the protein "Titan," with just my left hand, so I say THAT is the longest word one can type out with just their left hand.
In case you're wondering, it has 189819 letters, and no, there is no reason one would write out the IUPAC name.
Personally, I'm much more likely to type "stewardesses" into a search engine when I need to use only one hand... for whatever reason.
Once there was a TV show that you needed to guess the word by only a few letters revealed. I used dict/grep and found the answer but couldn't dial in. Some XXX dollars I lost!
Anyone else read this as unix dick grip, and it's magical puzzle solving powers? No? oh.. well that's why i posted as AC
Seriously. If Idle is supposed to be the garbage collection of bad /. articles, at least please make some attept to stop garbage like this from spilling out into other categories.
And for god sake someone give us the option to block Idle entirely.
If dereverberation is a word, wouldn't the longest left-handed word be dereverberated (14 letters)? Even if you don't count past-tense, it's still 13 letters....
C:\Documents and Settings\The MAZZTer>grep -i '^[yuiophjklnm]\{9,\}$' H:/usr/share/dict/words
Houyhnhnm
polyphony
who cares?
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
blog
Anyone who uses grep also uses tab completion (or double escape on older Unix). Both keys luckily sit on the left side of your keyboard so you can pretty much type anything using your left hand with only a couple of keystrokes.
IANWYTIA (I Am Not Who You Think I Am)
sweaterdresses
Fixes or solves?
There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand â" including one word that's even longer.
Wait, there is a word that is both shorter and longer than "stewardesses"?
You want me to click through two idiotic blogs to read about how someone did a grep -iv [yuiophjklnm] /usr/share/dict/words | wc -L? Just, wow, freaking story of the year, right there! If ever there was a time that putting the damn word in the summary would save some wasted clicks...
Also, what happened to 'tesseradecade'? The plural is 14 letters. (Look at that, I have grep too!)
sic transit gloria mundi
A long time ago I created a user name for myself using only the right hand: polyomninym
I must say, after 7 years of use, it feels so right! Pun not intended. As a musician of many instruments, I really dig the rhythm of key-strokes for certain words.
Most of my passwords use the left side of the keyboard, though not actual dictionary words like in the article. I found that it is much easier to enter a password using only my left hand when trying to hold a laptop with my right hand when I am in an area where there isn't a convenient place to place a laptop.
Hey, my job is to place those bones that were removed BACK into those fish. :-)
So I have been redevertebrating for years!!!!
Most men are devertebrated in front if cute girls.
...by users who apparently have no lives and will never have any children...darwin bless unix.
Is there any other worthwhile keyboard layout?
No sig today...
There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand -- including one word that's even longer.
And there are two words that should be used instead of "there's" when referring to a plural noun.
"There's nearly 2,000 shorter words"
Ironically, the word "are" can be typed with the left hand....
This being slashdot, and your mouse occupying your right hand, I'll just draw the obvious conclusion.
First thing i noticed when i went to the page was that the picture is showing a *right* hand on the *right* side of the keyboard... and carries the subscript "One word uses 12 keys from the left side of the keyboard."
Wonder what side of the brain was working there... ;)
The longest word I can type with my left hand is "okupukupu", you QWERTY-using insensitive clods!
[15:44:56] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{14,\}$' /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words
[15:44:58] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{13,\}$'
[15:45:04] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{12,\}$'
[15:45:07] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{11,\}$'
[15:45:12] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{10,\}$'
[15:45:16] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{9,\}$'
okupukupu
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
$ grep -i "^a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j*k*l*m*n*o*p*q*r*s*t*u*v*w*x*y*z*$" /usr/share/dict/words | perl -ne 's/\n//; print length($_); print " $_\n";' | sort | tail -10
6 ghosty
6 glossy
6 knoppy
6 knotty
7 Adelops
7 alloquy
7 beefily
7 begorry
7 billowy
7 egilops
Guess my dictionary doesn't have "aegilops".
Building Better Software
I use a Dvorak Keyboard you insensitive clods!
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
So we have an inane article about a meaningless subject (what's the longest word you can write using what is essentially an arbitrary set of letters), that uses inconsistent rules in its own little game (plurals are okay, but participles a nono?), that gets the answers, which were not even arrived at using an interesting new technique, wrong, ignores Dvorak (but don't we all?), tab completion and non-English words. Why is this on the front page?
I guess the author has ESL. 'Reverberates' uses only left-hand letters and is not past tense, so it would be the equal of 'stewardesses' (it's also not politically incorrect).
"Devertebrated" is as stupid as "deevolved."
Edith Keeler Must Die
WHY is this QWERTY GARBAGE on /. !?
I use colemak so I don't have to deal with qwerty, I don't GIVE A FRICK what the people who do can type with one hand.
This is worse than the 'news' about Windows' problems.
This is the SOWPODS international scrabble tournament dictionary /usr/local/share/scrabble
% egrep '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]{12,}$'
abracadabras
aftereffects
decerebrated
decerebrates
desegregated
desegregates
extravagated
extravagates
extravasated
extravasates
reaggregated
reaggregates
resegregated
resegregates
reverberated
reverberates
stewardesses
sweaterdress
sweaterdresses
watercresses
Buy Text Processing in Python
Courtesy of Mac Leopard.
Check out that awesome calculator that makes short work of this problem, and many others: Frink
TFA is about English, so I feel partially justified:
There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand â" including one word that's even longer.
Just for the record, a word cannot simultaneously be shorter and longer than another word. There, now I'm satisfied. (Also, "there are" instead of "there's". Now I'm really satisfied. And it's not from the stewardess porn.)
Removing reverberation from a soundtrack, also called echo removal.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
And apparently you missed that he used grep -x in his example...
Your regex is broken. You only want single words that can contain those letters, not words that just happen to contain letters from the left side of the keyboard. You lucked out since you're using such long words, but that wouldn't work to find all words that can be typed on the left hand side of the keyboard. That's why everyone else is surrounding the regex with ^$ - they know what they're doing.
Read your grep manpage:
You don't need ^ and $ (and some shells won't let you use $ expecting a variable name to follow it, even if you escape it) when you use -x.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
er.. redevertebrated was supposed to be the word. I was distracted by work. darn it..
Funny (for me) that this should come up today. After typing the AutoCAD command 3DFACE (also all with the left hand) I found myself wondering something else: What's the longest English word/command/whatever-strikes-you that can be typed on a calculator in hexadecimal mode?
FACED is five digits, FACADE and DECADE are six, ACCEDED and EFFACED are seven. Anything longer? (Make your own rules, but to me using zero for O or one for I is cheating.)
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
In the "Stupid QWERTY Tricks" section of his site, he lists all of the words that you can type on the left/right hand side of the keyboard...
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/stupid_qwerty_tricks.html
He published all of that online in 1998...
(1998-09-21)
In comparison, the longest Dvorak word, typed with only the left hand is: "upkeep" ...not that that has anything to do with the efficiency of Dvorak...
The other Dvorak word lists are far more interesting:
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/stupid_dvorak_tricks.html
-- Dave
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
So I guess it's time for another stupid/useful tricks post, this time for /usr/share/dict. You could use it to make a list of english-seeming words (that get people really confused when piped through 'festival --tts'), similar to this one:
http://user.interface.org.nz/~gringer/montyword.php
[okay, that's derived from IRC logs... I should probably change that to /usr/share/dict]
Ask me about repetitive DNA
grep -i '[qwertasdfgzxcvb]$' /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{ if ( length >a ) { a = length; b=$0 }}END{ print b }' :)
returns formaldehydesulphoxylate chez moi. An even better word
Is this only since Microsoft split the keyboard?
The way I learnt it, B was on the right.
Perhaps your dictionary stores æ as a single character.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
who only type with their left hand because their right hand is playing with their mouse? Could they then proclaim that they have every letter at their left handed disposal?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
The answer is "starcraft" guys.
I happened across this article about Eunoia which took 7 years to write. It's a book of poems in which each poem uses a single vowel.
For example, from Chapter E - For Rene Crevel
Try typing 'starcraft'
pretty hard to top that!
I thought of "monopoly" (and "reverberated" for left hand) back in high school typing class, but you've got me beat by 1 letter.
> This should be in idle... I don't see why it should be on the front page.
Before we can determine that, don't we first have to find out if this idea was invented by Shampoo?
someone came along and vertebrated something that I previously devertebrated, so I had to redevertebrate it
...a dvorak layout, you insensitive clods!
it was for left + right hand load balancing
dunno it?
"Daddy, why are you typing with only one hand??" "Hey, can't you knock!!??"
C|N>K
yes... so
deredevertebrated
i made the same mistake
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Ah, but you've missed the plural tesseradecades.
><));>
I use a Dvorak keyboard you insensitive clod!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I wonder if this guy had a former job in finance. He sounds like Greenspan on the shocking and unprecedented and totally unanticipated breakdown of counterparty surveillance.
Words which can be typed with only the left hand are all very well, but for a real challenge, compose a piano piece which can be played with the left hand only! And make it good enough to become a familiar part of the classical repertory, while you're at it. Maurice Ravel did just that in 1929-1930.
And he didn't do it simply as a stunt, either. A concert pianist named Paul Wittgenstein had lost an arm in WWI but didn't want to give up playing, so he asked a number of composers to write something he could play with his remaining hand. With Ravel's piece, and more by other composers, he was actually able to resume his career.
My daughter wanted to find English words containing letters in an alphetical order such as "biopsy" (monotonically increasing sequence of letters) and I thought she would be impressed if I showed her the UNIX solution using grep. Unfortunately it only confirmed her opinion of me as a nerd - see http://palamau.blogspot.com/2006/05/words-containing-letters-in.html
Coincidentally yesterday after I googled Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious I read this :
The longest words typable with only the left hand using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard are tesseradecades, aftercataracts,[17] and the more common but sometimes hyphenated sweaterdresses.[18] Using the right hand alone, the longest word that can be typed is johnny-jump-up, or, excluding hyphens, hypolimnion.
Yay, a Slashdot article as newsworthy as my random Wikipedia browsing!
You just got troll'd!
1) What is one doing while typing so that one does not have the use of one's right hand?
2) Why is 'stewardesses' not an entirely adequate answer under these conditions?
Have gnu, will travel.
Aftereffects! Disqualification disqualified.
And all this time I thought it was cool that Warcraft 3 was typable with only the left hand.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
So my dictionary file is composed of approximately 62,000 entries. Does anyone know where to procure (buy and/or download) a more exhaustive one? (I have OED resting on my shelf, which comprises approximately 350,000 entries, but governing the fact that I'm too lazy to digitize its contents via OCR...)
stargate
I suppose this little puzzle is extremely fascinating - for people who only think with half their brains. (Would that be the left half, or the right half?)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Schrödinger", or "Schroedinger" cannot be typed with just the keys on the left side of the keyboard.
;)
Neither can "woosh", I know
So why is this a solution to the problem? does this prove there is no longer word typable with only the left hand keys?
no, this is just a better answer than "stewardesses", but to really SOLVE the problem, you have to prove that there is no better solution!
btw. the article stinks! it doesn't tell what IS the 13 letter word - it links a blog post, which also doesn't tell the 13 letter word... You find the word ("Devertebrated") in the Comments to the blog post!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Why don't you write that damn word into your text??
For instance, i can't reach the article you linked atm, so this is absolutely worthless and annoying..
So there is such a word - great - but what is it?
sweaterdressed-stewardesses mmmmmmmmmm
so, what's the longest word with just the right hand?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I dunno, but on my keyboard, the bottom row of keys is:
z,x,c,v,b,n,m
Is "b" really on the left-hand side??!!
Even if you include shift,`,,,.,/,shift (13 keys) the "b" is seventh key from the left.
Never limit your regexp to a specific length if looking for the longest word :) /usr/share/dict/words
$ grep "^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]\{14,\}"
tessarescaedecahedron
$
You can write "as sete faces da terra" (the seven faces of earth) with your left hand on the keyboard.
So say we all
But I think two criteria are important:
-Tendency for lettering to alternate between the hands
-Most frequent words being typed using the home keys, home rows, and use of fingers tending towards the stronger ones.
I think dvorak does well enough, though I'm sure someone with letter/word frequency could come up with something at least marginally better than dvorak. Though since qwerty is ubiquitous, and I don't have to learn to retype.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's not the only issue here.
Why does the set "More than 2,000 shorter words" include the one longer word as well?
And don't forget - the word "be" can be typed with only the left hand, yet it wasn't.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I never liked the proper "home position" method of typing. I grew up hunting and pecking and, over the course of my career, evolved a unique typing method that allows me to type just fine.
So an article about typing words using only the "left handed" characters is a bit of a non sequitor to me.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
The enter key is on the right side of the keyboard, so you still need two hands for that wank matherial.
Not the longest, but my favorite has always been "bastards!"
I RTFA and didn't find any mention of this supposed word, anywhere. So I ran my own grep on the dictionary.
Left hand results:
Right hand results:
Top row results
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
The Obvious Question is why did it take so long to try The Obvious Solution?
And is there a place where I can just download the current dictionary by itself?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All that does is make the regexp ignore whitespace or something. It doesn't fix the basic problem where it'll match the middle of words.
WHAT IS THE WORD? I have been scanning this garbage for long enough!
WHAT IS THE DAMN 13 letter word!
What a billowy article.
I feel wronged.
It's an official Scrabble word (TWL '06, the current authority), though you have to make sure that you're playing with a version of the list that includes the longer words. Humorously, "devertebrated" is not an official Scrabble word at all. (The TWL is the union of five popular collegiate dictionaries, and it very purposefully does not include the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Try this: how many Os do you want in your WOOOOSH? You can make it either shorter or longer. Capisce?
I'm not impressed. The "left half" of a standard 104 keyboard contains 17 of the 26 letters. Everything but UJNIKMOLP.... come back when you have something better than this
This is interesting, but I have another, similar question:
I've read that the easiest words to type on a QWERTY keyboard are those whose letters alternate between the left and right hand. I'd like a list of words like that, ideally longer ones that I could use for passwords. However, I can't think of a simple (or even complex) grep command that would find those.
So the word is both longer and shorter, at the same time? Sounds like it's in some sort of quantum state! Well then the reason for the omission of the word from the article is obvious: looking at it would have changed its value ;)