The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36 | Hacker News Reader

The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

primes.utm.edu

42 pointsnrr27 comments

I set my colleages a challenge: write porn using only prime words.

"WIDEST WOMB WOMAN WATCHED PET PERVERT WHIP BLINDFOLDED YIDDISH BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD RUTTED BLINDFOLDED BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD PULVERIZED TRUCKMAN RUTTED TORRID"

"YARDMAN WHIP UNUSED WHELP, TROLLOP SUSPECTED SILKEN RUNT. PUTOUT, PARTED, LAIN. EVALUATED FETISH,EXPENDED. DISINTEREST."

I'm a little confused...why did he use base 36 instead of base 26? Aren't there only 26 letters we need to convert to numbers?

Consider hex and base 64. Base 16 takes the first six letters from the alphabet to augment the number of available letters for representing a particular value.

I guess using base 26 would make sense from a strictly alphabetic standpoint, but we've conventionally included the numbers 0-9 as part of the available letters for representation.

I guess they think words somehow include numbers

From the looks of things, no leetspeak was included in the list, thankfully.

There are no numbers in English, but some real languages with latinized character sets have numbers in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sḵwxwú7mesh_language

by convention in base 36, numbers can be represented by [0-9] and [a-z]. 1(36)=1(10) a(36)=10(10) and z(36)=36(10).

z(36) = 35(10), actually ;-)

Interesting. Could be fun to combine this with distributions on word length, etc... and compare the number of primes we see to the expected number of primes (using the prime number theorem).

Would be funny if we had a tendency towards prime words :)

Zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen!

It seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.

And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.

Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.

Then you'd just sort by length, too.

Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?

Kinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3 letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any 3-digit number).

My personal favourite:

PRIMETEST

But the list is surprisingly long, so not that surpring that something concerning primes would be in there.

FERMAT is also one. :)

More interesting is what isn't there: so prime is not prime.

See also: Richardian numbers.

One-third of the prime words are past participles

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | wc

      2560    2560   21156

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | grep "ED$" | wc

       843     843    7594

One of the words is halloween. How fitting.

I wonder if anyone will use this set of words for constrained writing.

Restriction? Henceforth, demonstration. You'd thought, "what person couldn't workup contrived composition?"

I already thought "zenith" was a fun word, and this just makes me like it even more. Yay!

Sigh, I thought it would be about PDP-10, the coolest assembler I've ever seen.

It's a shame that neither TECO nor DDT are prime. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com