Show HN: Puns from Wikipedia Page Titles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Puns from Wikipedia Page Titles

punnily.com

32 pointsspacether18 comments

I made a site that creates puns using Wikipedia page tiles as the source of pun phrases

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It would've been lovely, but your "puns" aren't puns! I put "trips" in there, and I got:

- List of largest cruise trips <=> List of largest cruise ships

- Trips Industries, Tips Industries

What you have here instead are rhymes, but not puns.

A pun would've consisted of two words that sound the same, with both meanings usable in the phrase.

I agree, and even knowing this, I assumed it was finding pairs of real articles that rhymed. But no. It’s just a list of real articles and made up rhyming titles.

You need to put in a funny word for it to be something that resembles a pun

That's certainly desirable but I'm not sure I'd call it a requirement? For example, if someone asks "We volunteered for this; who else did?" and you reply "Us two", that seems like a fairly uncontroversial pun with "Us too", but it's not particularly funny.

Linguists don't tell puns. They cant.

>A pun would've consisted of two words that sound the same, with both meanings usable in the phrase.

There are other sorts of puns than that but also, 'Trips Industries, Tips Industries' is a decent pun if you know anything about the trips industry. I agree that this is identifying rhymes, so essentially it's doing half the job and then you have to use context to understand if it's a valid pun or not.

Very neat but I don’t understand what it has to do with puns. These are rhymes, as far as I can tell.

Simple & fun. Well done.

Note for others asking how it works: this generates simple puns based off of rhymes. Many potential puns won't make sense. But if you were, say, writing an article about finding a bread recipe for the fall, the tool's suggestion of "Hunt for the Bread October" would be a good pun.

This was a great opportunity to enter a pun contest, so I generated 10 of them and sent them in as entries. When I asked who had won, they told me: "No pun in ten did."

This is awesome. Might have some bugs as others mentioned but I like this idea, it's capable of producing some hilarious material in combination with swear words. Some of the word substitutions are too dissimilar for my taste though I'm sure it's difficult to get the tolerance right on your end.

Just fyi I think you could make the experience better (maybe with another pun) if you hit the submit button with an empty field.

Right now it takes me to a poor error page

A pun is a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word. What you have here is a rhyming phrase generator.

Fun site, but I encountered what seems to be a bug.

It 500s for the word "bill" and (after some further testing) with "kill", "thrill", "will", "still", "fill" and "phil".

It worked with "infill" (no results), but not "refill".

Any clue what is going on here?

I like it! What's the process, are you looking up rhymes, then Wikipedia titles containing those words?

Glad to hear that you like it! Yup that's the process. Titles are in a relational db and fetched titles for a rhyme are stored in redis to speed up queries after the first one.

Oof! https://punnily.com/puns?word=Juice

They have been using guns

500

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