Wordnik.com: Mirrored Vowels: Comments

Comment by mollusque, about 1 year ago

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:40:32 +0000

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.

Comment by effigy, about 1 year ago

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:08:18 +0000

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."

Comment by mollusque, about 1 year ago

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:36:31 +0000

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.

Comment by effigy, about 1 year ago

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:14:03 +0000

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";
}