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Mirrored Vowels

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An open list of 397 words by effigy.

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About

Rules:
• The word must have an even number of vowels.
• There must be four or more vowels; thus, at minimum, an A-A-A-A or A-B-B-A pattern.
• The vowels must appear in a mirrored pattern. For example, the vowels in "feminine" follow the pattern A-B-B-A (or E-I-I-E for the literal-minded).
• No "-ed"s or "-ing"s.
• "y" is valid.

Contributors

Comments

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  • mollusque Thanks, effigy. I was thinking of things like embarrassed and embarrasses, where even if you disallow "-ed", "-es" still brings it into play.

    By the way, I've tagged the vowel sequence for most of the words on this list. I skipped a few like colesterol and recomposer, which are Spanish. Oct 25, 2008

  • effigy My first thought was no -eds or -ings because they throw an extra vowel in play, whereas -s does not; however, I'm open to suggestions. I'll cross it out for now—let's see what you've got!

    Thanks for the Ukrainian catch. I'll try to figure out how that slipped in there. Ah ha! My program had a bug: the strip all non-vowels part was case sensitive, thus ignoring "U." Oct 25, 2008

  • mollusque Hi effigy! Glad to see another vowelhound on Wordie. A couple of questions and comments. Why no -eds or -ings, but plurals allowed? I'd say, prefer the shortest form that contains the sequence, but if adding the ending produces the sequence, why not allow it?

    Ukranian doesn't fit the pattern. Oct 25, 2008

  • effigy Perl to the rescue!

    #open my $LIST, '-|', 'look "*"' or die $!; ### Solaris 5.8
    #open my $LIST, '<', '/usr/share/dict/american-english' or die $!; ### Ubuntu
    while (<$LIST>) {
        chomp;
        my $original = $_;
        s/[^aeiouy]//gi;
        my $len = length $_;
        next if $len < 4 || $len % 2;
        my $halfway = ($len + 1) / 2;
        my ($first, $second) = (
            substr($_, 0, $halfway),
            substr($_, $halfway, $len),
        );
        my $r_first = reverse $first;
        next if $r_first ne $second;
        print "$original: $first/$second\n";
    }
    Oct 24, 2008