a weblog of wordplay by Eric Harshbarger
More Heterograms
Working at a company that specializes in puzzle making lends itself well to wordplay. This morning a co-worker of mine asked an interesting question: can you find four 6-letter words such that no letter is repeated amongst the group?This question has probably been asked before, but I could not ever remember thinking about it (though similar puzzles I have considered).
It gave me a chance to fool around with some new "wordlist" classes I'd been working with in Java (convenience classes that can filter out profane words, etc), and with some wordlists I'd never dealt with before. In this case I was using the "2of12inf.txt" wordlist as my basis... this kept the words fairly common.
A short time later I was running a little application that was crunching through all 6-letter words. In about half an hour I had my answer. Or rather, answers. Among those fairly common words, only two quartets of 6-letter words were heterogrammic (the sets are similar):
BLOWZY FRUMPS JADING KVETCH FROWZY JADING KVETCH PLUMBSA quick check yielded no triplets of 8-letters words (also 24 letters total in the group). As I type this the program is looking for qunitets of 5-letter words... I'll keep you posted.
-- Eric
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Comments about this article:
The words BLOWSY and FRUMPS from the first group, and the words FROWSY and PLUMBS from the second both have the letter S repeated.Posted by: Peter
Oops... sorry, the first S's were supposed to be Z's. Thanks for pointing that out; I have corrected it now.
Posted by: Eric
How about three 7-letter words?
Posted by: Luke
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