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Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle

Posted by timothy on from the mysteries-of-the-ages dept.

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.)"

2 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Didn't work here by terremoto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >The longest word I got was 'redrawerredrawers',
    >which probably indicates that my wordfile is corrupted

    I think you've found a bug ...

    % grep '^redrawer' /usr/share/dict/words
    redrawer
    redrawerredrawers
    redrawers

    ... on Fedora 9 and RHEL 4 and 5 boxes at least.

  2. Re:what? by holizz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    % grep "^[aoeui',.p;qjkx]*$" /usr/share/dict/british-english-huge | awk '{print length($1) " " $1}' | sort | tail -n1
    9 okupukupu
    % grep "^[dhtnsfgcrlbmwvz]*$" /usr/share/dict/british-english-huge | awk '{print length($1) " " $1}' | sort | tail -n3
    6 crwths
    6 ftncmd
    6 mtscmd

    I think somebody compromised Debian's servers and added nonsense words to the dictionaries.