This word does not exist | Hacker News Reader

This word does not exist

thisworddoesnotexist.com

1,184 pointsadrian_mrd413 comments

Author here! Funny to see this at the top of HN today -- happy to answer any questions (source code is here https://github.com/turtlesoupy/this-word-does-not-exist)

Shameless plug for my other "this x does not exist": This Fucked Up Homer Does Not Exist https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com/

No specific question, but thank you for the highly entertaining (and interesting) site; I've had a blast with it.

"A Way With Words" would probably love this.

There's a link called "link" which creates a permalink to a given word.

The alternate site is particularly relevant to me; the first two words I "made up" were "cromulent" and "embiggen".

Well played.

Should have named it startupnamegenerator.com

You might need some filtering. I got the following output for my 7th or 8th try (I did s/ig/*/g because I hate typing this):

noun.

n*gerbar

n*·ger·bar

a bar from which the beer and liquor are sold

"that party got a whole lot cooler this week with a n*gerbar refreshment"

a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm.

It's hilarious that not even this GPT side project can escape the need for OpenAI-style output filtering.

Someone really ought to make an open source lib to solve this once and for all...

filtering objectionable content actually requires you to build a strong AI model capable of being offended itself, so it knows to hold its tongue in mixed company

edit: lest i leave this comment totally useless, the chatbot engine “chatscript” has pretty good capabilities for disambiguating word meaning and classifying the meanings into “badword” and “verybadword” - its free/libre software and very high performance.

https://github.com/ChatScript/ChatScript/

Objectionable is subjective.

So is skillful language use. We nonetheless think it is achievable without using wetware.

I think actually solving this problem is somewhat loosely reducible to human level intelligence in language understanding. The next best thing is a pile of patches that fix cases of the increasing creativity of the human adversaries to the system as we become aware of them.

You should aim higher than that. After all it was human level intelligence that got a proffesor fired for saying "nèige", a Mandarin filler word, in a lecture about filler words in other languages!

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/usc-professor-slur/

I don’t have access to gpt-3 but have wondered how much adding “without being offensive” to the prompt would help.

On one hand it’s the promise of the algorithm that such things will work, on the other hand I doubt it.

a simple blocklist might be just the cheaper and easier solution. After all, blocklists were, and still are being used to filter human output as well. And fail-safe. A person with a hobby project does not have a legal/pr department to deal with the consequences of AI having a bad day

Or, better yet: we should all work to make sure every human being has their basic needs met and is treated with respect, and then words like this wouldn't have as much power.

Ah crap, good call. I did a first-pass at filtering for the ones displayed on the site but my regex must have had some misses.

Not as bad, but also probably something for a "blocklist": cockshop a shop selling flannel and scarves

(you might want to read up on the use-mention distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...)

Please could you explain the relevance of the article to the previous comment?

Perhaps throw10920 thinks I should have just used the word because I was only quoting the output, so it wasn't really me saying it, but I chose otherwise. I don't need to read up on the use-mention distinction to decide whether to make such a choice.

I have a feeling the parent poster realized they were only mentioning the word, but chose not to write it anyway. For a lot of people, it is a very uncomfortable word after all.

How long did it take to train this GPT-2 based model?

It's a refinement of a lightweight version of GPT-2 by Hugging Face -- https://huggingface.co/transformers/model_doc/gpt2.html. I don't recall exact numbers, but once I had the structure of the problem right (i.e. sequencing words, part of speech and definitions) it was around 12 hours on my old 1080 TI.

Ahh, and you've made the wise decision to NFTify the fucked up Homers! Nothing says "investment vehicle" like-- hey, wait a minute!! That's a fucked up Bart!

Good day, sir!

[0] https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

Alright! Someone shilling on my behalf. Say what you want about NFTs, every time I see one of the homers sell it brings a big smile to my face.

Frankly, I'm mocking it. Or trying to. Riffing on it? NFTs strike me as obvious nonsense -- why not use all that energy for something more useful, like piping /dev/urandom to /dev/null -- but NFT sales of obvious nonsense, of an algorithmic corruption of an artistic representation of a shared cultural totem, are almost high art.

Like, unpleasantly high art. Way too high art. Art that makes me want to go lie down for a bit.

It's just digital trading cards, like pokemon or baseball cards. Just amateurs are running the show now, but the NBA already got in on this, so if you want something more legit: https://nbatopshot.com/

Hey now, they're not just "digital trading cards, like pokemon or baseball cards"! They're also an enormous waste of resources!

Yeesh. At least collectors of sports memorabilia have some memorabilia to admire. I can't imagine what value-add there is for "NBA Top Shots" that I can't replicate by backing up a short clip of the play. My solution is more durable, too!

Gold is just a rock. Why do all humans value that nonsense so much?

No, gold is an amazing substance in its own right. There are rarer and scarcer metals, but gold is special. This conversation relies in some part on the ductility and conductivity of gold to power our computers. It doesn’t tarnish and it is very malleable. This means you can shape it into some very beautiful and durable forms with even crude hand tools. The potential value add is very large. It’s use to back currencies is largely symbolic but it was chosen for good reasons.

Gold is also impractical to synthesize by modern methods!

Also it is very dense, silver is not so it could be forged too easy.

Gold has properties that are similar to copper (highly electrically and thermally conductive, lustrous, and malleable), with the added benefit of being corrosion resistant. Many of the industrial applications of gold and copper are similar.

Which would suggest that if gold and copper had the same supply, the demand would be similar and thus the price would be the same. It turns out that's approximately correct— the ratio of gold and copper's prices is similar to the ratio of their supply.

> waste of resources

Are you able to provide data comparing the footprint of NFT's to baseball cards, Magic the Gathering cards, paintings, etc?

Do you even know what you're talking about? Or just regurgitating some talking points you heard somewhere?

You can admire your digital trading cards! Just check out this program I made that cycles your NFT's as background wallpapers for your computer. github.com/NotaRealThing /s

All of money is imaginary and all things have a representative monetary value. All of the above are imaginary things. Work from this basis, the rest of this will make more sense. So now if you use your imagination, we can start lining up some value. What value does gold have in World of Warcraft?

No, it's digital money laundering

Data art is anti-dada.

Lately HN feels like just recycled Matt Levine.

Which is high praise (except for the recycled part).

> Frankly, I'm mocking it. Or trying to. Riffing on it?

Frankly, you failed :-)

I'm as sceptic to crypto as almost anyone but this was one of the nicer ideas.

No I'm pretty sure he did fine, NFTs are little more than a vehicle for money laundering and a joke for a normal people.

These are awesome! Thanks for putting your work out into the world, turtlesoup.

In my free time I make paintings of outputs from GANs/Deepdreams/etc. I've been wanting to paint something based on a model trained on illustrations, but I hadn't seen anyone decent GAN trained on that kind of dataset yet. Thanks for sharing your code, this is really exciting to see!

I haven't either (beyond anime / animals, which is widely explored ala https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/) -- if you do see anything let me know.

Tangentially related, one more of my favourite parts of this work an artist that made illustrations of some of the fucked homers: https://twitter.com/turtlesoupy/status/1349541080719478784

Given the rise of Loot and other text-based NFTs, you might want to NFTify this too. I know Loot does this by creating a URL with the text in it that points to a text image generator.

Which is a bad strategy as dictated by signaling theory [1]. There's nothing rare or costly about them when you can keep hitting refresh to get a new one.

Instead, if there were only a few produced in the world, and you owning it give you some kind of status, then you'd have a real potential NFT.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

It is worse. Anyone can own it. NFTs don't avoid copying, and they are in no way recognized as copyrighted material. Its like having a proof of ownership of a public good: worthless.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I just bought the NFT for the SF Golden Gate bridge, which surely means I own it.

The fellow who sold it to me said so.

I bet with the right license you could convey legal rights to the NFT owner.

Please say you take requests.

Press "write your own" and it'll make up a definition for you :)

"excremulant"

Somewhat inspired by your homer work :)

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/QcRs

does the definition exist or is that machine-generated too?

Both definitions and words are machine generated!

impressive

Well duh obviously it exists, arent you reading it? Therefore it falls in the realm of existence

lol jk, im just fucking around with the semantics of words here. However I have to admit, this thought about existence or truthfulness of concepts or statements being spitted out by unsentient machines that mix and match infinite "real" patterns, has me quite worried...

Sometimes I find myself reading at a whole discussion thread, and I get the uncomfortable sensation that everything I've been reading is a bunch of bots training each other's models...

Not quite when the concepts are complex enough, all right, it is easy to spot pointless mouthfuls deviations of a main subject being discussed, but what about, for example, the user reviews on an amazon product? Or a youtube's vid comment section? Or whatever shit you consume from the internet.

I'm by no means any expert in the subject, and current state of the art of the Turing test, but I've seen just enough GPT-3 whichcraft to start being totally skeptical about anything I see online.

sorry for the huge rant, but i took a great effort to make it sound like its coming from a real person XD

also, to @turtlesoup: Thank you, that was wonderful. I hope you enjoy this cup of coffee too :-)

Has it generated a word for the noise you make after sipping a cup of tea or a cold drink? The “ahhhh” sound. I nominate the word “fonce” if it’s not already taken.

“The pair sat foncing so noisily over their hot cups of tea that it drove everyone else from the room”

Ahahahahahaha! What a foncy sippers!

moaning, the word is moaning, or involuntary escaping of air. If it's done really loud and on ourpose that's just called being an asshole, basically.

> https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com

I'm now more interested in how the transitions are made than in the generators per se.

I'd suggest this code to follow: https://github.com/lucidrains/stylegan2-pytorch/blob/fc22408.... The standard practice is to interpolate between the source latents and target latents and feed the interpolated values into your GAN. There are various ways of doing interpolation (i.e. not always straight linear interpolation)

So I just had a hit on a real word (pejorative), not sure if that's the plan or not

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/oLvV

The word linked above is "perjorative", which is one letter away from being a real word.

I think what it does with real words is almost more interesting. The definition it picked for the word "real" was accurate, but kind of odd. If I recall correctly, "real" was defined as, "committed", or "dedicated", as in "real fans only like the vinyl edition of that record." Which is like, true for sure, but not in the top 10 things I'd think of first.

I agree. It does the same with for instance "ballsy", which it defines as "stunning and stylish", as in "the ballsy pink dress".

I just thought of it. Kind of terrific crossword clues.

Fantastic work! How did you learn to make the Homers? I would love to create something like this.

What's the meaning of "liff"?

hmm. out of 5 words i generated, two actually exist: bioamine and bioprocessor.

You may have just done more to bastardize the english language than all the slang of the past 10 years.

And by that I mean that the words are good enough that people will use them and lexicographers will have no choice but to add them to dictionaries.

Regrettably I hit refresh, but one word it said did not exist was "geochronology"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology

It writes Wikipedia articles too? Thus the Singularity begins.

The "word" segmentation seems pretty off, even for these hallucinated words and meanings. Are they generated by the same model?

thiscrossworddoesnotexist could be fun and perhaps devilish.

Do you do inference on every visit?

What is the cost of being on the front page?

Always curious of how you walk around the latent space in these, are you just linearly interpolating between two random high dimension points?

It would be glorious if we could share definitions. Who wouldn't want to tweet "chadocracy"? or "prospectivism, the belief that an action will have a good outcome".

It's got a good grasp on the difference between Norwegian and Swedish, I see; it defines Norwegian as "very light, quiet, or peaceful; tranquil", as in "we live our lives Norwegian in a quiet quiet city", and Swedish as "wicked or excessively wicked", as in "his swedish exploits". Haha...

This is cracking me up LOL

It would be an amazing screensaver, just iterations upon iterations of Fucked Up Homers.

I first got 'rudimentally' which certainly does already exist although it's not the most popular of words.

I played with this and it is super interesting (almost made me register a couple domain names!) That said, to me, it once again reinforces the belief that a large factor in GPT-3 amazingness is the taste in prompting/filtering that humans apply to it, that is, it produces a ton of crap that does not catch our eye that we just silently ignore and discard, but we will amplify and share amongst ourselves the output that is interesting, which imputes a huge selection bias external to the intelligence of the model itself that we may perceive as the model's.

Computers aren't creative; the excitement about GPT-3 is humans projecting something into its output or filtering the small number of bits that appear to make sense, as you say.

Neural language models are just recycling bits that humans have said before, they address well the "how to say" part of NLG (Natural Language Generation) but fail with respect to the "what to say" part.

> the small number of bits that appear to make sense.

What I find most impressive is just how much of it's output appears to make sense.

Of course "make sense" is the critical part of this. It's skin deep - but still quite astonishing fairly frequently.

is it skin deep though?

Well it's certainly fragile and easily lost.

Are you implying some deeper understanding in GPT3?

I agree it's fragile and dreamlike - but it is in my opinion genuine understanding. If you have or ever do have children you can observe them pass through a similar kind of stage, fractured incomplete understanding, dreamlike, yet still understanding. It crystallises slowly overtime. I predict the same will happen as we expand the models and add more complexity.

> humans projecting something into its output or filtering the small number of bits

I think this has value and is an interesting form of machine assisted creation.

There is something similar, but more simplistic (no AI, just old-school RNGs), going on in generative music. For modular synthesizers, some of the more popular modules are random sequence generators [0]. These allow the musician to generate random elements of the music, say melody or drum pattern, but curate it. You might generate dozens of elements, carefully tweaking parameters, before you hear "the right one" – which you then actually use in the music.

I guess my point is, curation of generated material is a form of creation! The generator is perhaps not the creator, but it is useful to develop better generators.

[0] : such as “Turing Machine” from Modular Thing and “Marbles” from Mutable Instruments.

I was starting to write a response, and realised how patterned the debate is.

We've been discussing the topic of machine intelligence since the start of CS and points of contention tend to show up in the same places.

Anyway, it occured to me that if given 10 tries, GPT-3 probably produces my comment adequately. I have an uneasy suspicion that it might take fewer tries than that... especially if prompted with "netcan, please respond."

Anyway, the upshot is that for someone like me, on the "if you can't tell the difference" side of the cliche... your side's insistence that machine's can't be creative makes me doubt my own creativity, to the extent that the argument is convincing.

That fact that humans can be creative does not mean that all humans are. Nor does it mean its actually all that common. True creativity is very rare. Even people we normally describe as "creatives" are mostly working off of convention and are influenced by others.

I've come to accept that 99% of what humanity does is derivative and mediocre. That's ok.

A machine sticking that mirror in our face is still gonna be weird.

I’m predictable ergo AI.

No. I'm predictable, ergo weak AI is predicting me... thus making me self conscious about by predictability.

I'm on the "if you can't tell the difference..." side, too, but the issue is the "10 tries" and the prompting. GPT-3 has no ability to revise or reconsider or judge anything it writes. We're still safe, IMO, until the main loop goes

     >generate 10 "netcan comments"
     >drop 5 least conformant results
     >reword remaining comments several times
     >reassess rewordings, select best of each set
     >select 1 most conformant "netcan comment"

Right now (AFAIK, anyway) all GPT-3 does is the first one. Think about how a human is creative -- lots of drafts, lots of dead ends, lots of borrowing, lots of revision. I appreciate that "reflection on its own output" is waaaay out of scope for a glorified, omni-contextual Markov chain, but I think we're safe, both from the threat of GPT-3 being "creative" in the same way we are (and therefore, maybe "alive" in the same way we are) and the threat of our own mental processes being revealed to be as merely computational as those of GPT-3.

Oh I don't disagree that the "best of gpt-3" on twitter is automated hyperbole machine.^ But I think at least in HN, a lot of people have looked at somewhat more objective sources too. The standard way to prove a trick shot is to film yourself do two or three in a row. I agree these are tricks, and a lot are unproven. Some are proven though, FWIW.

Anyway, if the damn thing can do me 10%-60% of the time in a non trivial context... IDK, maybe this just becomes the default standard for "non trivial." and it's no big deal. It is disconcerting though. In any case, assuming GPT-3 progresses... there might be uses for software that does just the first of those things.

All my above comment really means for sure is that NLP can now participate, simulate and perhaps instigate flame wars better. Flame wars were always one of the easy targets, so that's not much of a standard. Who knows though, maybe the road to AGI is a gradual refinement of a flamewar bot to a dialectic philosopher. Cheating on essays is gonna start getting fun.

^If a person uses the Tom Sawyer fence trick to automate a task, is that automation? If the machine does it, is the turn tables?

Absolutely. The "problem" essentially goes away with a cyborg approach: let GPT-3 generate its 10 netcan comments, then have a human do a little refining, maybe reframe the prompt, edit the result a little, and bam! Much scarier! Not that a sufficiently determined human couldn't ape someone's comment style, but GPT-3 is a force multiplier in the same way that sockpuppet management software is for the professional sockpuppeteer -- scales better, more effective, just makes everything easier.

I've heard serious speculation that GPT-3 (or certainly its successors) might find utility for writers as a combination of a ghostwriter and Github Copilot.

>^If a person uses the Tom Sawyer fence trick to automate a task, is that automation? If the machine does it, is the turn tables?

It's not here yet, but the grim day on which I no longer communicate with anyone on the Internet for fear they're not actually a living conversational partner approaches. Even those I can cryptographically prove are people that I know will be suspects: "euurgh, I'm too busy to talk to this guy today, he's so boring. I'll just feed GPT-10 all our old conversations, tell it to be me, aaaand..."

Messaging apps already do a bare version of suggesting auto-replies. It's mostly it's a texting-while-driving aid, so they keep it concise and uncomplicated. Code completion already exists. Spam. Gradual steps have places to start stepping.

the "best of gpt-3" on twitter is automated hyperbole machine

Isn't that step 4 in the GP's scary loop? Having the humans do the assessing, then select the best by counting the number of likes/retweets?

this is the only way to reliably use GPT-X in a production setting. you have to postprocesses the responses with a second model, until you find one that is 1) reasonable 2) coherent 3) related to the topic of the prompt

Well, yes. GPT-3 is basically just a huge index of internet content. (Mostly UGC like comments and such?)

So all it means is that your "internet voice" tends towards a generic baseline average.

tldr - be more original and don't follow the hivemind.

pretty much the point I was going for, except the tldr is, I'm not liking this theoretical morros showing how unoriginal I am.

Spend some time with the slush pile at a magazine... Human creative output is also heavily filtered and selected for.

I think the point is that this slush pile needs to be automated as well before the hype around GPT-3 is realized.

Maybe computers aren't creative, but imo there's a stronger argument to discount creativity in the first place then: https://www.markfayngersh.com/post/the-thinking-placebo

I wonder how much of that is due to the task GPT-3 was trained for? Perhaps the "what to say" part is working perfectly, but what it wants to say is as generic a text stream as possible. It already seems like GPT-3 has more "knowledge" than is obvious at first glance, but you need to prompt it correctly.

Your statement that computers aren't creative is not true in general and it's especially not true for GPT-3. It can generate text that appears random at first glance but which has a structure hidden within. As I wrote above, there is no way to prove conclusively whether any given sentence generated by GPT-3 was actually written by GPT-3. But if we assume that all sentences were indeed written by GPT-3 then some of them must be very good indeed because many people find them interesting and worth reading. That means that GPT-3 has demonstrated creativity.

(a response generated by GPT-3)

I feel like this implies that creativity is the creation of the interpretation of a work rather than literally its creation and I don't really agree with that conclusion.

It;s true that selection bias is a factor, and the way GPT-3 is distributed tends to aggravates that.

Also, this is a human impersonator. It's not surprising that we find it personable and interesting. We find ceramic dolls personable and interesting. People can't really be trusted to evaluate human-looking things well. It's just to triggering to the instinctive biases of a social mammal. A gorilla impersonator would probably amaze gorillas in much the same way.

That said, I do think there's something to these nlp systems that we didn't have before.

The poke-poke stage of examining novel tech tends to be quirky, and most almost-insights are bogus. Stuff that's cool but useless is as compelling as useful stuff, at first. This isn't a long stage though. We usually gain a grounded understanding of a technology only when we find a use for it. Technology being used for something is what makes it technology, for some definition of.

Prompting & filtering by humans is how GPT-3 is "operated." That it's merely augmenting the creativity of the prompter is a philosophical concern. The practical one is that it needs prompting and filtering. Also, it's trivial to automate some kinds of prompting and filtering.

The caveat being that what catches our eye when flipping through GPT-3 output is more often comically absurd [0] instead of meaningful or 'intelligent.'

0. dishwitter dish·wit·ter a person who eats hot wax or other food "she was a dishwitter"

That said, if I go through this for 5 minutes and pick the 10 best words they will be much better than the 10 best words I could make up in 5 minutes by myself.

I feel you could use it for like 10 seconds to get some inspiration and then trivially come up with something much better. It’s kind of like brainstorming with somebody who speaks before they think.

There's a subset of words produced by the site that trigger obvious and amusing ideas of what they could mean in the reader, but the generated definitions have nothing to do with that, and usually do not make much sense (besides being sometimes grammatically incorrect). It's evident that the software has no semantic understanding of what it generates. The rare occasions where the definitions appear to (almost) make creative sense are just statistical flukes.

This is just GPT-2 btw.

This isn't even 'GPT-2'! Since that usually refers to GPT-2-1.5b. It's GPT-2-117M... distilled, so an even smaller version of the smallest GPT-2. Amazing it works so well anyway.

Appears to be a collection of perfectly cromulent words; someone should propulgate them into wider use in order to embiggen the vocabulary of our youth.

approbated!

ISO C++ is probably working on std::embiggen<T, traits, options, defaults>.

perfectly cromulent indeed!

Stellarocious!

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

“Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg

Dude--your putting shade on my shine. My peeps get my drift.

dabs and yeets away

I understood every word of that!

What even makes a word 'real'? I think is the bigger question, if you can say something that everyone implicitly understands, is that not real?

Googler:

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/googler/eyJ3IjogImdvb...

"an idle person" -- hahaha

cheeky jab at the competition

Hah, I just noticed that the url has base64 json in it. Is there a name for this pattern?

`{"w": "googler", "d": "an idle person", "p": "noun", "e": "my googlers runnin' over the kitchen sink"}`

I call it the "too lazy to set up a database" pattern (I'm the original author :P). There should be an signature in there too so hopefully tamper-proof.

Haha! Minimum Viable Product!

That's just a query string with extra steps.

X with extra steps... sounds like a REST call. REST is just HTTP with extra steps. DBMS is just a pile of files with extra steps.

I got "hylomorph". Given that hylomorphism is a term in Aristotelian metaphysics, surely hylomorphs exist?

It's also already taken as a startup name!

The generated "using it in a sentence" examples are often the funniest (and most absurd) part:

  chokebone
  choke·bone
  the muscle holding a prisoner down, used in controlling an animal or person such as a cat, dog, snake, snakebite, or spider
  "he managed to regain the chokebone and win the auction for his 12-year-old daughter"

I feel like it's been learning from urban dictionary https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/BpmB

coffeebomb cof·fee·bomb

    a bomb which, in addition to the usual stimulants such as caffeine, turns out to be deadly if inhaled by a person having sexual intercourse
    "a young man survived a blast of coffeebomb, killing two men and wounding five"

I got r/politics [1].

    1. a forum for discussion on social media to discuss    articles, debates, etc
    "new users joined during his r/politics show".

Could this be a tell or where the AI is being fed ? or something else?

[1]https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/r%2Fpolitics/eyJ3Ijog...

Usually text transformers use reddit posts for some training data alongside wikipedia and others.

In The Pile, a large text dataset, Hackernews is included too if I'm not mistaken.

https://media.arxiv-vanity.com/render-output/5356367/relativ...

I got:

  stochasticity
  stochas·tic·ity

  a form of structure characterized by irregular bending and contraction of the body in some objects

which is a word that does exist, albeit with a new definition.

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/stochasticity/eyJ3Ijo...

Same, I got "subloci"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/cG4J

This tool is neat, but it needs a better dictionary lookup for avoiding real words.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/subloci

I got loctite, which is a brand famous for making thread locking adhesive - so much so that the product is generally referred to just loctite in the industry, similar to tissues/kleenex and vacuum cleaner/hoover.

Apparently now it also means "a mineral of the basaltic and orogenic variety, typically occurring in white phosphates and blue crystalline crystals" - I love that the blue crystals are crystalline too!

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/jmWn

Edit - I also got "flaky, sticky" !!

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/2ToL

Yeah I got scrimming which definitely is a real word also

  adjective.
  unprestigious
  un·pres·ti·gious
  (of a person) strong, imposing, or impressive
  "an unprestigious figure during his lifetime"```

(https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/u749)

Hmm. I think it might need some more work. I mean, there's a strong argument that unprestigious is not a word, but if it was, that certainly would not be the meaning.

One would think that about inflammable too

Or unhulled

There is only poor, easily dismissable argument that unprestigious is not a word.

The un- prefix is a highly productive morpheme English; dictionaries would only waste space by listing every possible un- word.

I'm not sure why, but "non-prestigious" feels more "correct" to me. I know that those prefixes aren't identical in meaning though, so both could be words with slightly different meanings.

What about objects that cause you to lose your recently acquired prestige?

To me, at least, "non-prestigious" sounds neutral, while "unprestigious" sound a bit derogatory.

Or it might be OK. After all, loosening and unloosening your shoe laces is the same thing.

Also inflammable and flammable.

English is strange.

Inflammable means flammable? What a country!

Strange and dumb are actually synonyms in this particular context.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife...

This word most definitely does exist: https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/SidH

Some of these could exist if we just start using them. The best one I've found:

  tootbox
  toot·box
  a place where something, especially music, plays
  "do you need a tootbox in your bedroom?"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/FKYq

Yes, they often read like words from an alternate reality where the chaos of language use & neologisms went just a little bit differently.

It reminds me of Grandpa Simpson's "Onion on your belt" story.

Seems a good name for a Mastodon client.

My word was a bit disturbing. Meat cooked in a sauce of raw meat over ice. Yum.

Plumata:

a dish with layers of meat, vegetables, or seafood cooked in a sauce of raw meat, vegetables, and herbs, typically over ice and typically served with other fresh ingredients

Sounds like something straight from the Don't Starve (videogame) cookbook.

I would try this "beef ceviche" dish if I knew it was from a safe source. Can't be worse than rare steak.

Steak tartare might be a good first step before this.

Steak tartare is one of the most underrated dishes. I prefer mine after a few minutes over a flame grill, a piece of cheese, and a round roll. That can turn it into something that I really think would catch on if people tried it.

aka bresaola

Similarly:

parceleducate parcele·d·u·cate transfer (the intestines) into offspring, typically as a sacrifice

Sounds like an SCP ritual.

SCP-6121

Object class, Keter.

Upon the birth of offsprings SCP-6121-A, subject will feed SCP-6121-A via the process of parceleducation. Intestinal matter will be sourced from the closest biological entity within a 300 metre radius, replacing the organic tissue with an organ SCP-6121-B.

The Church of Featherless Birds is known to invoke parceleducation as part of its initiation ceremony. Those possessing SCP-6121-B are known as disciples of the Vulture King.

If they haven't trained off SCP Foundation material, they should.

(Or someone with a bit of spare time should. Then again, maybe they have, and this is the 7th time I've made that suggestion).

We don't have an SCP-055, is this your first day?

Another SCP-sounding one:

noun. endosciller en·dosciller

    a surgical instrument that conceals the central organs so as to be able to swallow blood
    "a cardiac endosciller"

Yeah so on the disturbing scale, I think this one is quite good:

extroraptor

ex·tro·rap·tor

a device by which a fetus is detached from another animal by means of an entrails lasso and inserted in other muscles

"underhanded methods of caressing the fetus with an extroraptor device"

You had me at entrails lasso.

entrails tasso

Sounds delicious.

I just got “mycobiology”, with a perfectly correct definition. I’m guessing its dictionary is incomplete, and it reinvented that word on its own.

Yeah well the first word I got was this...

cronyize: convert (something, especially the skin of a pregnant woman) to a cork or tar by treating the cork and tar with ice or other heat-resistant fat, then applying the skin on top of it to make sure it is moisturized

I know everyone's going to post their favorite word but this one made me chuckle:

    adjective.
    refereeless
    having or showing good judgment
    "the refereeless refereeing of the 1968 Summer Olympics"

In the same vein:

mammical - relating to mammals "mammical mammal food"

tachycloid - a fossilized fingerless skull consisting mainly of rounded fragments, each containing paired digits

I kinda want to see art generated from that last one as a prompt. Sounds terrifying.

Perhaps pipe the definition through one of those AIs that generate art from text descriptions?

More confused on mine than anything.

noun.

shiznitpats

shiznit·pats

a $10 bill placed across the chest of another prisoner without proper reason, typically for mental anguish

"the shiznitpats were held and transferred to juvenile detention center"

I’m dying, this is great. So much to love, particularity the utterly absurd syllable breakdown

geographography ge·ographog·ra·phy the art or science of drawing maps "technical advances in geographography"

It only took me three tries to find a word that does in fact exist, albeit with the wrong definition.

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/antifragile/eyJ3IjogI...

My first was "anzeigen", which is actually a german word.

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/anzeigen/eyJ3IjogImFu...

Probably not a Merriam recognized word, but certainly a trending word a few years ago

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/85HD

pussyhat pussy·hat

    a woman's loose fitting undergarment, typically made of a soft cotton tweeden
    "we ordered a pair of bright-colored polo pants and jumped at the chance to wear a bra with our favorite pussyhat"

I read it as "This World Does Not Exist", which would be a fantastic NFT collection.

This NFT is not real.

It could also be an article on any of: psychology, physics, philosophy or Buddhism.

the .com domain looks like it was registered a few hours ago

Hope that was you!

Haha, nope, unfortunately it wasn't.

Create an NFT and then trademark the invented word.

I got "boochy" and I'm going to use it today at standup: "having or showing a characteristic or exaggerated enthusiasm for a particular activity or situation"

bocci

   ludocystectomy
   lu·do·cys·tec·tomy

       a surgical operation after sexual intercourse in which a lictor appears to cause men to ovulate but then to become unconscious
       *"he had ludocystectomy to ease his symptoms to a lesser extent"*

frankly, i'm quite amazed

This one's pretty nice:

driftly

    (of water) flowing in a slow, sweeping way
    "a driftly waterfall"

Is creativity going to be the first major human trait upended by AI?

I feel like the trope has always been "But the robots will never be able to express beauty/art/music/prose like humans". However it seems that all early AI is focused on and doing surprisingly well at creative pursuits. If someone rattled off words like this I would be amazed at their creativity.

We're finding that stuff we thought would be impossibly hard is subject to brute force using simple constructs, and stuff we thought would be simple is proving incredibly difficult.

Moravec's paradox in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Funnily the stated definition seems to fall for its own trap. Perception, here named as a particularly hard thing is something AI is starting to get pretty good at. Mobility lags behind a little, but we've seen some incredible demonstrations there too.

Perhaps it's always the things that are on our awareness horizon which seem hard but end up solvable. What's next? Perhaps long term planning, interference and on the fly learning? And then what are the difficult things beyond that horizon, the challenges we can't even see yet?

First trait? What about computation, memory and logical reasoning? Computers crush people at all of these and have been doing them so well for so long that you don't think of it as AI. Still, definitely not the first human trait that computers can beat.

Creativity is hard to talk about in this context for a bunch of reasons - it's hard to define, I don't think it's that impressive in humans, AI models are already decent at creative tasks like image and music generation but those are all based on training examples...

I wonder how long until an AI can do well on the logical reasoning section of the LSAT. My guess is not anytime soon.

I use novel words for debug printing, and for a while I was tweeting them:

https://twitter.com/debooger

I got words that do exist, for example "high-performance motor"[1] and "retrogradeness"

[1]https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/sxFD

That's fine, I guess, for a silly website - but it's not hard for me to imagine a company taking this idea, "AI/ML created X" and selling X's, even copyrighting them... when X already exists in the real world

I imagine in real life applications you’d need to add a bit of checks and balances around the ML output (e.g. cross check against a dictionary/copyright database)

Also, some words used to exist but have fallen out of use or morphed. For example "wif" is an archaic spelling of "wife," but the definition given on the site is "an animal's fur or fur stock."

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/gvjU

> even copyrighting them

copyrighting isn't (at least, in US law) a distinct action people take. If it is subject to copyright, the it is copyrighted on creation by operation of law.

> when X already exists in the real world

To the extent that a thing is copyrightable by nature , coincidental existence of an identical thing doesn't make it any less so. It might make it difficult to prove it as a creation rather than a copy if challenged (or to prove that an alleged infringement was a copy of it rather than the identical doppelganger), though.

> bruegela a thick, smooth-skinned black pepper with a slightly bitter taste, of the red pepper family, widely used as an anesthetic to treat conditions affecting either limb or the hands, such as gallstones (also see green pepper) "these great kinds of bruegelas flavor every bite"

Haha that’s a wonderful example of how pattern recognition absent understanding can generate nonsense.

When this was posted last time, I read it as "This WOD (Workout of the Day) Does Not Exist". It inspired me to make a workout generator trained on workouts from crossfit.com using a character-level RNN.

A year removed from it an I still laugh at some of the ridiculous workouts.

https://thiswoddoesnotexist.com/

I actually got a real word, albeit with an incorrect definition.

    adjective.
    nonexclusionary
    nonex·clu·sion·ary
    of or concerning people or organizations that don't receive due respect
    "nonexclusionary criticism of religion"
    a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm.

   dirtbaggery - the action or practice of taking liberties with the truth of a matter and using it as a weapon "dirtbaggery is not the end of the world"

...seems pretty accurate.

Way, way beyond cool, right out there on the horizon of what is possibly great. Greatastic!

greatastic greatas·tic of the greatest quality; Great. "the greatastic works of the Socratic philosopher"

microlithography mi·crolithog·ra·phy

    the diagnostic or microscopy of embedded structures or tissues "biosensors with lens-guided microlithography"

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/microlithography/eyJ3...

It does exist. And the definition is not so far of. It's about creation, not diagnostics, tho.

    frood: noun
    
    (in dogs) a thickly furred section between the forelegs, covering the upper upper surface of the hind legs; a hindleg
    "a ferret with an astonishing, yet brief, frood"

Douglas Adams is rolling over in his grave.

Douglas Adams

Good call! Many of these do seem to have an Adams tone to them.

It does seem to owe something to The Meaning of Liff.

OMG, this can't be claimed as never existing, what if it starts to exist, this is too realish:

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/microtoxin/eyJ3IjogIm...

Funny it does seem to already exist...

https://www.juvaplus.com/2020/05/27/micro-toxin-a-technique-...

https://beautyandbodylounge.com/microtoxin-for-lower-face-an...

Yeah, not surprised. That one was too real. I didn't check for usage. Thanks for finding that

  resillience
  re·sil·lience

    the quality or state of toleration; tolerability
    "our resillience toward the world"

Hmm.. Maybe they need to do a soundex comparison to avoid this sort of problem?

I got "nonfalsifiable", which I'm pretty sure is a real weird.

The ability to synthetically generate real words could be considered a feature -- a sign that it is working well. Was the definition correct?

transpile [1]

> combine (vehicle parts) with another person's

> "a car with both legs transpiled to fill the remaining area"

Hrmmm.

[1] https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/transpile/eyJ3IjogInR...

I'm a big fan of this one. https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/snarry/eyJ3IjogInNuYX...

  snarry
  very angry, angry, or angry
  "“Don't worry,” Mark read from the snarry voice"

I was reading some reviews on Google of rave clubs in Budapest and Google translated them from Hungarian to Croatian.

The translations were quite funny and bad but I noticed a bunch of new Croatian words that do not exist in any dictionary.

There were a couple of reviews where I found myself laughing because I implicitly understood the review but the Croatian words were completely made up (Googling the word you won't get any results).

So I guess the translation systems might already create words, especially for language pairs that don't have enough data.

> There were a couple of reviews where I found myself laughing because I implicitly understood the review but the Croatian words were completely made up (Googling the word you won't get any results).

Is it possible some of those were actually Hungarian words being copied verbatim into the Croatian text? Or maybe close variants of the Hungarian words (such as in a different grammatical case)?

I've seen before, when translating from one language to another, if Google Translate doesn't understand a word, it just copies it verbatim from the source to the target. I don't know whether this is true, but it seems possible to me it might even sometimes "normalise" the word when doing so (e.g. if it doesn't recognise the word, but recognises it as being in genitive case, it might convert it to nominative and stick the word "of" in front when translating it to English, assuming the source language's grammar is sufficiently regular to permit it to convert an unrecognised word to a different case.) I've definitely seen it transliterate unknown words in the source language before (when translating from languages with non-Latin scripts.)

Doing something like Hungarian to Croatian is likely worse, because it is probably being chained through English instead of being translated directly, which doubles the possibility of odd things like this happening. Since both Hungarian and Croatian have grammatical case, if it is doing the kind of "case-based normalisation of unknown words" I was talking about, it might do it twice (Hungarian->English then again for English->Croatian), creating even weirder results.

Hungarian and Croatian are very different. There's only a few things that might match (like vegetable/fruit names) but verbs and nouns are very different.

The words that I was surprised by were with proper declension (taking gender into account) and sometimes there were very unique verbs that felt right in Croatian but if you search any form it just doesn't exist anywhere.

If you can remember any of the Hungarian links you observed this behaviour on, and if you can cite any of the specific words from the machine translation you are talking about, I would be appreciative – not that I know any Hungarian or Croatian, but still this topic has piqued my interest

I tried out "portmanteau" a word which actually DOES exist and is kinda what you're going for here. From Wikipedia:

A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two underlying morphemes

Your tool says:

"a word that probably exists; with an alternative definition made by a machine learning algorithm."

i got decisor, which i think is a word?

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/decisor/eyJ3IjogImRlY...

wiktionary says its obsolete but i think that still counts as existing? lol https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decisor

Isn't that what you call an incisor that falls out?

Interestingly, I've got "kaufmanism" (and a random machine learning definition); this word however has recorded usage:

> A "Kaufmanism" is the persuasive rhetorical juxtaposition of words that reverses the subject and object of a phrase often meant to change its context and meaning, typically used to add additional emphasis to both nouns.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Kaufman

I once dreamt a word, and when I woke up and looked it up, it didn't exist anywhere. I wonder if I refresh this page long enough, whether it would eventually appear.

In theory, yes. But it would take an infinite amount of time, unless you're like SUPER lucky and get it on the third refresh or something :D

In theory, no. There is no reason to think this neural net will output every possible string given enough time. That'd be quite unexpected.

You might as well wait for a monkey to type it on a typewriter.

Sorry to the author but this one doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

Generally, the syllable breaks for these words are not quite correct. The two words that I got were Paulotomy and systerectomy. These were broken into Paulo-tomy and sys-terec-tomy. That generally goes against length-of-syllable-in-English rules that... I can't articulate. I would break these into pau-lo-to-my and sys-ter-ec-to-my (sys-trec-to-my would also be acceptable).

dude, wtf

Syllables should always have only one vowel (technically nucleus) in them, which means that the bogus "syllables" the website is producing can't be real syllables - that might be the rule that you can't articulate. However, the website actually does not use GPT-2 to produce the syllables, it uses the library "pyhyphen".

This library provides (misleadingly) a function claiming to create a list of syllables from a word, which does not actually do that and instead splits the word up by all possible hyphenation points - and not every syllable break gets or indeed should get a hyphenation point. (For example, you do not want to break up prefixes or suffixes during hyphenation.)

[0] https://github.com/turtlesoupy/this-word-does-not-exist/blob...

[1] https://github.com/dr-leo/PyHyphen/blob/master/src/hyphen/hy...

Would it be correct to say that syllables in English are made of nuclear vowel phonemes and valent phonemes which could be vowel or consonant in nature? I’m not a linguist, but I’m very interested in language and how words are constructed.

I'm not sure what you're referring to by "valent phonemes." The standard treatment of a syllable, not only in English but cross-linguistically, is that a syllable is composed of an cluster of consonants at the beginning (the onset), a single "nucleus" phoneme that is most often a vowel or, somewhat less often, a sonorant consonant like 'r' or 'l', and another cluster of consonants at the end (the coda). The specific ways that syllables can be formed in a particular language are governed by the "phonotactical rules" of that language. These are rules like the English rule that an "ng" sound may only occur immediately after the nucleus, or like the Japanese rule that a coda may only be "n" or "" (the null coda).

I was kind of referring to valence electrons - so think “edge phonemes” - but I don’t think that came across.

This is a really interesting explanation of something that I kind of understand, but want to have a deeper understanding of. Any good references you can think of offhand?

Reminds me of the "Black Adder" episode where he meet the pompous inventor of the Dictionary and purposely sets about using made up words just to annoy him.

"I shall return interfrastically!"

(Relevant Clip Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08)

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/3EUd

    micropharmacy
    mi·crophar·macy
    a large organization of people sharing a website
    "the blogosphere and micropharmacy collide"

That's a pretty unintuitive definition.

a bit NSFW:

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/HgkP

  pussygasm
  pussy·gasm
  excessive or erotic fondness for one's genitals
  "he shared a cocky but disgusting puke and was subjected to even more pussygasm in his younger years"

Although the definition is totally different than the way we used to use the word.

If its from Urban Dictionary, there will be lots of words <household word>gasm.

Perfect for startup .com names. It found insulately.com which is currently available, for your insulation start up!

well , "crowdstrike" did come up for me. Wish I saw this site a decade ago!

I've long wondered about these "X does not exist" - are these generated on the fly or pregenerated and displayed from a list on the backend? If so, are they hand picked examples?

Because the hit to miss ratio on this and other ones I've seen are just too good, literally unbelievable that it's just raw output without some kind of curation. defectariat de·fec·tariat a small class of people constituting a large voting bloc in elections, owing to insufficient awareness of the issues at stake "the failure of the social welfare system to recognize the defectariat"

EDIT: If it is generated, isn't running the kind of datasets that produce this level of results extremely expensive? Is this trend some kind of advertising of skills for job hunt?

At least for the image generation sites, a common approach for performance reasons was to continuously regenerate the content and just fetch the latest one when requested. So they're fresh and do not repeat but are not unique if many users hit at the same time.

This took about 8 seconds to come back. A little longer and I'd think this was just a mechanical turk front-end with especially witty workers taking the jobs:

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/LdrP

This is as perfect example of just how horribly bad the typical "X does not exist" examples are, because here we all know the pool that is being used for training and can call out shitty "creations" for what they are. For instance I got "diaminoid" and "interchangerability". It's extremely transparent just how bad it is. But when people do it with faces, you don't see this, because you don't know the training set so you can't compare. Every attempt at showing "how great ML is at generating completely new X" owes it to the people wasting their time being fooled into thinking that it actually works to always also show the closest couple of entries from the training set.

Those are some very harsh words for a fun little side project.

I think they should use wider dictionary to check if the word really doen't exist.

I'm sure bibliophilia exists and means something else. https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/SnsB

I like the "make your own":

fambulation fam·bu·la·tion

    a party without children
    "a fambulation party"

fursty

    unpleasantly or racy
    "some of those old traditions have the whiff of a fursty sense of humor"

We entwicklers can bestow this to our webmaster brethren:

peltweiler

    a person, especially a computer user, who regularly updates the website of a large company with news and commentary and regularly goes online to view and comment on its content

I've always wanted to explore the word2vec space to find the most sparsely populated region, then (assuming you can train some sort of reverse vec2word model) coin that word that the English language was apparently sorely lacking.

It's too bad that even the best dimensionality reduction algorithms still really suck. Visualizing and inspecting latent spaces is super sweet and eventually I think it will become extremely useful and common...

Might be an extreme example, but I thought you’re not allowed to use the word in the definition:

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/extremology/eyJ3IjogI...

This is worse than the time Microsoft trained a bot with Twitter. https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/FBgk

This definition mentions a boner.

  jerrybob
  a hard game chicken of the American game turkey, related to boner and eaten raw.       
  "I'll give the jerrybob another shot"

Love it.

---

glugger

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/RxWg

---

superfessional

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ySHx

---

spankety

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/LyH6

---

discooper

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/LU7K

---

deframicroscope

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/m6mD

I’m really surprised that nobody speaks about sudoflowerus more often!

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/sudoflowerus/eyJ3Ijog...

Owh almost literally cromulent! https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/tramulant/eyJ3IjogInR...

Previous discussion/Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169962

I love when you get shockingly accurate definitions

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/w/%F0%9F%A4%96/eyJ3Ijog...

I also have an interesting one, 'f.head'

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/XB2q

On a lot of these, the definition is nonsense but the example sentence is totally plausible:

"a freejam is an informal dance that breaks the rules of the music scene"

I would totally buy that.

Solid domain generator

So true! It could be fine tuned more explicitly on existing domains and their popularity.

Agreed! Put an affiliate link to namecheap.com or your registrar of choice, many of these words sound like brandable startup names.

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ZpPr

noun. yotang: a member of the Y chromosome "an orange yotang"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/Pe86

noun. gigafag: a book of official records, especially one for President Lincoln "a great gigafag of official statistics"

I will make it my mission to ensure this word comes to exist

noun. spiderspoop

spi·der·spoop

a flower of a small tree of the praline family that provides the basis of many vegetable roots. Spiders are often a source of vitamins and some essential essential minerals "assemble these pieces of spiderspoop moss to a large pot"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/SaSg

This is pretty good. There's a logic to language that allows this (along with all sorts of other domains).

I remember trying this with a friend of mine back in high school, making up realistic sounding words in order to chun each other, making the other believe it was a real word. The natural path is to go Latin (chromozymatic), but sometimes you find a simple sound that ought to be a word.

"Chromo" and "zyme" are both Greek rather than Latin, though.

Oh god I hope my teachers don't see this. This is even worse than polyamory and meritocracy.

This seems like a good tool for coming up with company names. You want something unique and plausibly English, but not already taken.

I would love to see a youtube series of coders going through the process of getting a dataset and refining it into these as outputs. Probably not possible as a livestream but looking at the iterative process of doing the model development, eventually getting to the final generative process. (Brownie points for the web app part for web app dev neophytes :)

> elegium

> a substance or book called, in ancient Rome, the sacred treasury of a god > "the temple is situated or held by the elegium in the church"

does exist but means something else

at least here: https://en.pons.com/translate/latin-german/elegium

That would make an interesting word game: mix in unusual words and you have to guess which ones are real.

I bet some would get adopted eventually.

"The game comprised two teams of three (a captain and two guests) who would compete to earn points by determining the correct definitions to obscure words. The teams took turns to give three definitions, one true and two bluffs, while the other team attempted to determine which was correct. If the correct choice was made the team earned one point, if not, the bluffing team earned one point. Both teams took turns turns bluffing and determining definitions.

Examples of words used in the show, taken from a 1972 book published in connection with the it, include "queach", "strongle", "ablewhacket", "hickboo", "jargoon", "zurf", "morepork", and "jirble". "Queach", for instance, was defined as "a malicious caricature", "a cross between a quince and a peach" and "a mini-jungle of mixed vegetation". The first and second of those were bluffs. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_My_Bluff

There's a version of Scrabble that's played with made-up words only.

"clam!" (exclamation). The most entertaining part was the example of usage: "clam! It's so simple!"

See also: The Meaning of Liff

http://liff.hivemind.net/

I have that book on my shelf. I forget why I got it, but I like word games so I'm sure it's connected.

Dang! Just saw this. Agreed!!

Awesome!

  baconroot
  ba·con·root

  a large, fleshy plant that yields bacon
  "a baconroot salad"


  trickety-clack
  trick·ety·-·clack

  a thing consisting of a series of short leaps or twists with no obvious ends or ends, typically in order to draw somewhere
  "the trickety-clack of trains"

I got severnometer. In my language, sever means north. Severno is either northern, or northward-ness. So severnometer is a device to measure how aligned you are with north. A compass. So while I got a word that doesn't technically exist, it's still meaningful and has everyday use.

"a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm."

I've minimal understanding of AI/ML but from what I think I know, isn't it all based on probability and therefore the quote above that these words don't exist is.. possibly wrong?

It wouldn't be far fetched to assume that it checks output against a real dictionary

Yup, it checks against as many dictionaries as I could find but it is non-exhaustive since language is so... flexible.

Any resemblance to a real word with same spelling is purely coincidental.

These AI generated pages are so annoying. Google results are extremely polluted with those. Often these are AI generated subtle adult content. It's disturbing when you search something about C++ you get pages about sisters inserting pointers. Often on the first page of results.

Self-referential definition???

  noun.
  bezoan
  be·zoan
  a stone resembling a dome made of bezoan
  "thick bezoan pottery"

(https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/31nY)

The word I got was "flink", which actually does exist, in German, it means 'nimble'.

Also exists in Danish, meaning "nice" when describing a person.

There's also Apache Flink.

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/vWzR

Nontourism seems like it already exists? I think if I ask people fluent in English what that means, they'd guess more or less the definition above.

  noun.
  kölsch
  1. unwanted drinking in or as a means of controlling one's drinking

As a German, I don't see anything wrong here.

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/5mgC

Hmmmmm..

    noun.
    pixer

      a black person
      "a pixer of social propriety with no real social skills"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/CghV

"Monike" - (of an idea, idea, or person) not actually existing; unrealist

This was the 5th word it generated

Just Monike.

I'm sure this thread is full of this, but I really liked this one.

noun. subsequentity sub·se·quen·tity

    (in Kantian philosophy) a system of contenting, or, rather, a discourse on the content of that discourse
    "subsequentity to the abolition of monism"

Hi, I took the time to try to answer your question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28893728; would you be willing to clarify?

I'm procrastinating on other stuff, so I'll elaborate, but not because I have any responsibility to.

Both you and the author are guilty of using imprecise language as if it were precise language.

>imposing activity, as opposed to forbearance from activity.

When you use imprecise (ie natural) language, what you are really doing is using generic language. The natural language is a template for deciding whether a given formal language construction can replace it. I claim that I can choose a definition for activity, such that these two concepts two are logically equivalent, that is heuristically compatible with the natural language. For example:

Time moves forward, and whatever you do while that happens is your activity. the ways to require me to perform some activity in a set of activities are equal to the ways to require me to perform some activity in the complement of some set of activities.

In fact, I think that you might have some trouble defining activity in such a way that those two things are different, but the point is that there is ambiguity.

This isn't a minor point. The author uses natural language constructions as if they were logical constructions all over the place, and then further builds propositions out of them as if he were using formal constructions.

>a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed....

A sensible logical interpretation here is that all of the agents must be completely isolated from each other. Each one is maximizing their own utility in their own black box. If they weren't, then they would each be naturally infringing upon each other's agency to not be observed by each other by observing each other. We have explicitly excluded that case, so we must be talking about isolated agents. In this case I agree with the premise, even. The ultimate in democracy is indeed the (pointwise) maximization of each agent's utility. As a logical conclusion, this is fine. It more or less follows from the assumptions and I have no immediate problem with it.

However, if we are asked to additionally assume that these people live on earth and are subject to earthlike constraints. This clearly violates the premise, as you even point out yourself.

"Oh no", a strawman might say, "it is bad faith to instantiate these natural language definitions with example formal definitions that yield contradictions!"

What else am I supposed to do with informal reasoning? But fine, supposing that we really do have a good way to define "infringing on each others agency" so that people can live on earth together without doing it. What even is the sum of their agencies or whatever measure is being used? In my earlier example, I just needed a partial order, and the agent's isolation from each other was enough to guarantee me a maximal element, all of a sudden I have to both combine different people's utilities into a single number and then order the result of that combination? And this supposed ordering happens to have a generic maximal element whenever no one is infringing upon anyone elses agency? I would describe this as unintuitive.

If the author has an argument for or proof of this fact, they better make it more explicit than this, rather than just talking loosely about how ant colonies solve pathfinding problems (stigmergy).

On a more constructive note it is true that I disagree with the author's premise. It seems that the anarchists solution to the prisoner's dilemma is either to simply pretend that its an edge case and doesn't happen often enough to worry about, or to redefine social utility to prefer the situation where both playes defect because it is a Nash equilibrium, and therefore must be ideal.

Going even further, I can get universal consent to impose a policy of punishing defectors. This is a constraint on free agency, however, so universal consent and "free agency maximization" have nothing to do with each other.

Some make much sense such as

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/9fHe

and

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/kdTL

"Shop smart... shop s mart!"

probably a lot of these in there: words with an edit distance of 1 from a real word where the "fake word" is too close to be interesting. one I found was "subdivison", which I thought just said "subdivision": https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/uYDQ

also "jocky", which sure doesn't literally exist but it's hard to argue that it's meaningfully dissimilar to "jockey": (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/J8RS) anyway this is pretty fun all the same.

in another episode of "algorithms doing a racism" I landed "cacadian", whose definition is "a black person" (we're ok so far) but the example sentence was "I'm the worst cacadian up here", which... https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/iTVc

"nondestructable" (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/bBD3) is given the definition "of negligible quality or severity" but definitely gets used (spelled nondestructible) to mean "a thing that can't be destroyed" when talking about games with destructible environments

"downcycled" is definitely a word (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/JRd8)

innocuous ones I liked include unclary (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ibNn), saucescent (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/4VTH), nonboreal (https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/eCqw).

I think it's pretty fun.

  upperchatter
  up·per·chat·ter
  excessively cheerful and energetic talk.
  *"upperchatter of an older, less energetic crowd"*

  a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and 
  used by a machine learning algorithm.

Are these being generated in real time or are the pre-generated and pulled from a database?

They're pre-generated[1] looks like. There's some checking to avoid trying to add existing words also.

1: https://github.com/turtlesoupy/this-word-does-not-exist/tree...

I got "nonaccurately" and before I understood what the site was about I read "this word was invented by machine learning algorithm" and wasn't surprised to think ML engineers would have actually come up with this.

I got:

adjective. roasty relating to cooking outdoors or under boiling water in order to steam and grind food "an attractive, roasty summer harvest"

But "roasty" is a word that exists. Maybe not how they tried to define it but it definitely exists.

Interesting that it comes up with a definition that might incorporate the sense of any root words (if present):

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/pr7C

I just got "dispouse" which would be the perfect name for a divorce startup.

My second word "dehacked"

rebuilt or altered to take its elements. "a dehacked set of computer programs"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/yVMF

> noun.

> manucca

> a forest, especially one with trees or shrubs that grow from the sea or mountain in the center "she went diving together on manucca Lake"

It would probably be good if this had a filter applied to filter out words that already are defined.

> adverb. > unconciously > un·con·ciously

Yeah, pretty sure this is a word too!

This reminds me, somehow, of "The Meaning Of Liff". A wonderful book you need to read.

A sense of it can be found here: http://liff.hivemind.net/

Funny, I got chown which is definitely a word that exists for some definition of "word."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chown

    excalculate
    ex·cal·cu·late
    present (something) as a number to prove a mathematical result, check an error, or settle an argument
    "excalculate your estimate with the data at hand"

Might want to add a filter. The seventh or eighth word I got was a racial slur: n-word bar (compound word I don't care to type).

That's the problem you get when you feed the whole Internet into your training data.

    chickshit

    chick·shit

    a player scoring a goal, especially before an opponent has managed to seal the scoring
    "he was on his way to the whistle as a one-time chickshit"

"Algebrically": in a way that shows extreme emotion. https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/vtAj

This seems to be a real world, but with the wrong definition: https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/PQp9

I have a compulsion to create terms for arbitrary concepts such that recently I've considered learning German because it's easier to create new words (via compounds) there.

An evil use of this would be to publish a faux dictionary.com site filled with fake words and definitions so that when someone searches to see if a word exists, they find that site.

Not suitable for children.

I sent my daughter the link as I thought she might find it interesting. The word she got was "wankerout" which was read out loud, unexpected and not appropriate.

Sounds like it's not appropriate for you since you are the one that has a problem with it.

Children say "rude" words all the time and nothing bad happens. [0]

[0] source : I am a former child.

Reading these words reminds me of "The Deeper Meaning of Liff" by Douglas Adams.

I'm tempted to make word-a-day calendar out of this and put it on my desk .. see if anyone notices.

Frankly, I am feeling a bit targeted by my random word selection:

——

pompkins

  1. lack of vigor or impulse and ineffectiveness, as in an animal

"she knew he was wearing a pompkins"

This is a great one:

pissiwog (noun)

pis·si·wog

a large solitary mammal with a loud but misshapen sound, the dorsal shell having spiral rings of horny eggs

The few I tried didn’t make much sense. Like:

electrochromium elec·trochromium an extremely thin blue or red spot or color "the scene had a vivid green electrochromium"

Would fit well into much sci-fi writing tbh!

dipman dip·man

    a man who dipped his penis (of the head) into water
    "chad became a dipman (especially during the American Revolution)"

I always wanted to write a name generator that would iterate through name-sounding syllables and postfixes, just to create unique names.

Three kids later and I never did it.

I got

```

noun. bronchym

a word or phrase that has the same meaning as another word or phrase and that has a conjugated form

"bronchym for i, j, k"

a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm.

```

Quite apt, I'd say.

Misread as "this world does not exist", an alien website that generates fake but realistic-looking worlds such as the one we currently inhabit

(2020)

Plenty of previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169962

noun. chokou a soft, creamy white sauce of soy sauce and white wine, typically typically made by pressing chili peppers in small pieces "a soy sauce flavor profile that mixes a littlechokou with pine nuts"

Not even close, how would you make a white sauce with white wine and soy sauce. "Typiclly typically made by pressing chili peppers in small pieces"??? That doesn't even make sense lol

I love this. It's awesome. The aesthetics are also very well done.

Potential improvements:

- The share links are weird

- Let me give a word to the machine and will return an interesting composite

Prisencolinensinainciusol

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

LOL this just made my day.

slidefist

a rope with a shallow angled blade, used to make the opening at the end of a balloon into its top

"a canvas slidefist to lift a baby full of clothes"

Needs a link at the bottom to register it a domain :)

Agreed. The author might even make a few bucks if he made it an affiliate link (I believe several of the registrars have affiliate programs).

Like others in this thread, I've really been tempted to register a few of the ones it's come up with for me. I will definitely come back and give it a whirl the next time I need a new name.

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/QFoc

This word does exist.

This would be great for generating passphrases: "correct horse battery staple" becomes

hippoglossia periceptor wharfoon northerl

Good luck guessing that one, hunter76!

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ncBy

Sadly, it balks at producing a meaning for gaffuration, which I made up and entered. I was so eager to discover what this means!

Neat, some of these got pretty close:

vascularitis vas·cu·lari·tis

    inflammation of the vascular system
    "a case of vascularitis"

That word does not exist in any language It will never be uttered by a human mouth.

  Talking Heads - Give me back my name

bastoid

bas·toid a large round or rounded fist-shaped organ, especially one that curves in front or near the anus

"I found what looked like a giant bastoid tattoo near the entrance to the office"

https://l.thisworddoesnotexist.com/EnnD

This is a great project name generator.

‘hyperecessionalism

hy·per·e·ces·sion·al·ism

lack of optimism or optimism and typically resulting in reckless or even illegal speculation’

So many new words

Is there a website like this - show a new word interesting word at each refresh - but for real words?

Is there a website like this - show a new interesting word at each refresh - but for existing words?

The antipartition displayed by my team as I used several of these words was quite akin to concassimo

It took all of three tries to get an existing slang word.

"clunge" - not safe for many working environments.

If only I could generate my own words for the NYT Spelling Bee. Alas it doesn't work that way!

I got:

nonlocentric

non·lo·cen·tric

    (of a material object) having no boundaries

    "a nonlocentric microscope"

Mine was "deauthenticate". Very surprising it isn't considered a legitimate word.

I got piscushion -- a small bowl with a handle used for filling the body of a person's anus

It gave me on my first try. Shaftwheel. Which is a word returned in Google search results. ;-)

I got "reconnaisance", which is how I spelled reconnaissance once in a spelling bee.

I got "minitel" for the word that does not exists which is kind of weird on HN...

My word was found and indeed existed on Wikipedia, but I hadn’t heard it before at least.

You know what's more fun? Defining real words.

Toilet - a place where toilet paper is kept and washed

Also - startup name generator :)

Allow me to extend my contrafibularities for creating such a fun little project.

The definition of that would would be along the lines of “Anti calf bone feelings” or “opposition to calf bone like sentiments” if it follows standard English and was being used in the correct context

yadda

    used to emphasize the polite response indicated by an acknowledgment of a situation being discussed or acted on
    "she left after the yadda, and I wasn't ready to tell someone"

Next level: use these words in definitions of other words, not just examples.

I got "zergling," noun. Slanderous to say it's not a word.

superquadruple su·perquadru·ple a quadrilateral consisting of four lines or poles and six equal circles corresponding to a point "a pair of triangles with a superquadruple of radius"

I got "underpenetration", which seems kinda like a real word.

Cool! A really nice domain-name / brand-name generator. Thank you.

This is better than most domain name generators you see in the wild.

So when will we see some serious applications for this GPT-3 stuff?

I wonder how many of these words will eventually become a reality.

I got microsimulation, which exists and even has a Wikipedia page

Link /vL5R

eletronic (of a word, expression, or development) affected by chance but more likely to cause sorrow or disappointment "a vivid eletronic expression of grief"

Too real.

"biothrusting"

ok, closing tab now, can't get better than that

interparence

in·ter·parence

an intervening branch of a larger branch or group

"the interparence between the private and public sectors"

I feel like this could be a real word, though maybe not with this exact definition.

Biplotter - "Someone who plots a plot"

I'm really impressed.

Over half of the first bunch I got came up in Wiktionary.

I'd like to read a newsletter named MetaMuffin.

neat but can find obvious generic repeats based on specific syllable arrangements.

human things lead to human things, plant things lead to plant things, etc.

naxaloid - (of a person) having an axial tubercle at the back of the pelvis "a naked naxaloid parrot"

I didn't realise parrots were people!

It is written, hence it exists. Fun to play with.

"Deamidated" exists...

Otherwise, it's fascinating!

Bo! An invective. It’s a word, why I never bo!

That definition doesn't even make sense.

A nice resource when naming your new company!

The machine learning druids are at it again

This is a great source to register domains!

thispassworddoesnotexist.com would be a good one for a password generator.

thisarxivpaperdoesnotexist.com would be good for laughs.

This is a really solid band name generator

Good for science fiction writers maybe

pitchstick

pitch stick

1. a small ball of wool or cotton (usually uncircumcised) "don't stick a pitchstick around a room"

Great tool for naming variables :D

It guessed a few of my passwords!

First word I got was disability!

It's a digital Shakespeare

second word that appeared was 'règle' which is a very common French word

My new project name generator!

Just English words? Boring.

cool.. some new JS frameworks and npm packages can take inspiration :)

I got pre-cognition. Ahem.

I got "minitel"

doesn't amazon do this with brand names now?

I got a captcha.

stochasticism does exist? i think ...

This idea is not new.

Show me 4 of the same sites.

this "this does not exist" does not exist

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniglet and probably hundreds of incarnations before that. It's still kinda neat though.

I'm holding out for this website does not exist personally.

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