Comment by llimllib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by llimllib | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the insight!

There's no actual answer to the question, given that the word list can be set inconsistently, so I had to choose _something_ to go off.

The best word list I was able to find is the one hosted by https://www.sbsolver.com/ , but unfortunately they don't distribute it.

I got a somewhat better word list for part 2: https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/03/mitzVah_-_the__worst...

But it's still imperfect. However a lot of the words I expected to be invalid have actually been in puzzles before, so it's not easy to guess which are going to be good and which aren't.

edit: there have been puzzles with as few as 16 words before: https://www.sbsolver.com/stats/count/low

edit 2: I modified the program to print puzzles with at least 16 words, and the "worst" puzzles it found with that constraint are:

unbEknown, jawbonE, monadnocK, woRkgRoup, daGlock, moonwalK, confLux, buLLhorn, yOkOzuna, Fraught, hogliKe

I think your word list is still considerably too large. Zero chance in my mind that jouk or qajaq, for example, would make it to the NYT wordlist. (I don't think they'd even be accepted in the crossword, which has looser standards, unless there was a very specific theme that called for them). Apart from being obscure, their only use seems to be as non-standard spellings, for juke and kayak respectively. The Spelling Bee doesn't even accept UK spellings.

At least 5 of the proposed pangrams wouldn't make the cut, either.

I agree with you, do you have a better one? I can only work with what I have

[1] has a couple of references to lists of common words used as inspiration.

[1] https://gitlab.com/engmark/xkcd-passphrase-generator

Perhaps you could scrape https://nytbee.com/, mentioned in the thread, for the historical answers, or contact the owner. Also @banana_giraffe, a commenter on this thread, seems to have scraped 6 years of data.

Then you could take a very permissive wordlist and filter it using the historical data. For all words of six distinct letters or fewer, you could determine whether they were allowed, not allowed, or indeterminate (no puzzle ever appeared that would have allowed them). My gut feeling is that you'd be left with very few indeterminate words, though jouk and qajaq might well be among them - review those manually.

They've loosened up the rules since I left many moons ago, likely to expand number of puzzles without repeats. IIRC we had about 5 years worth at the beginning.

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