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Phloeonomus gets Bored
What's in a Word? - "Protea"
| Dear Phloeonomus In case you are bored, like me, on rainy days here is how you work out the number of possible combinations of letters (not necessarily meaningful), from a word of length L. I have written up a programme to give me all of these and have checked all the meaningful ones: |
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Therefore from the word "PROTEA", where L is 6 we get:
Thus we have 6 one letter "words", 30 two letter "words", 120 three letter "words" and so on to 720 six letter "words". The total is 1 956 possible combinations of letters or "words"!
If you make the word "PROTEAS" and increase the number of letters by one, then you then make my computer program very, very painfully slow.
Thus there are 13 699 possible combinations of letters, including the very many plurals.
Nigel Forshaw
Note that only 110 of the possible 1 956 "words" are valid English words. So how many of the 13 699 "words" are possible for "Proteas"?
ANSWER TO DO YOU KNOW? HOW MANY WORDS CAN YOU MAKE FROM PROTEA?
The following is the list of words derived from "Protea". A total of 110 words was obtained. Four entries had over 75 words. Two of these were most remarkable: Peter Ross used an ancient Webster's and must have read through the whole dictionary to get his 92 words. He is responsible for the really dubious "words" in the list. A team of Nigel Forshaw and Derek McCullum used a computer to generate all the possible words (see below) and then ran these through spell-checking and Scrabble programmes to find 96 permissible words. All will get T-shirts. Oh, the most forgotten word in "Protea"? - "Protea" of course.
a, ae, aero, ape, apert, aport, apt, apter, are, aret, art, at, ate, atop,
ea, ear, eat, er, era, et, eta,
o, oar, oat, oater, oe, oer, op, ope, opera, opt, or, orate, ore, ort,
p, pa, par, pare, part, pat, pate, pater, pea, pear, peart, peat, per, pert, pet, po,
poet, pore, port, porta, pot, potae, pote, prae, prat, prate, pre, pro, proa, protea,
r, rap, rape, rapt, rat, rate, re, reap, rep, repo, repot, ret, retap, roate, roe, rope,
rot, rota, rote,
t, ta, tae, tap, tape, taper, tar, tare, taro, tarp, te, tea, tear, ter, to, toe, top,
tope, toper, tor, tore, trap, trape, tret, trop, trope.
So 5 of the six one-letter words (the judge's decision is final!), 14 of the 30 two letter words, 38 of the 120 three-letter words, 34 of the 360 four letter words, 18 of the 720 five-letter words and 1 of the 720 six-letter words were valid!
DO YOU KNOW? # 30. OH NO!
Now for the number of words from "PROTEAS". We will assume that everyone has all the words from the last competition, so that everyone will start with 110 words. How many additional words can you find?
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