English dictionary fun

[Mike Lewis]

I don't know if anyone is still lurking in this forum. If so, here's a little exercise for you:

What are the longest words in English that can be made up from each row of a standard English typewriter keyboard?

So, each word can only contain letters from a single row, but each letter can be used multiple times.

I recently downloaded a file that contains 194,000 English words, and I hope to use it to generate various word games and puzzles. I started out by writing a program to find the answer to the above question. The results are quite interesting.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[Chris Miller]

Another reason you can't compare the running time is I only measured finding all possible paths. The rest is just an SQL query on the data, I didn't integrate the parts into something running standalone, partly because once you have the data there is no need to not store and reuse it.

Chriss

 

[strongm]

>If your question is driven from whether to step up from VBA to anything else:

Nope. Been programming for over 30 years (although these days more as a dabbler than as a profession). Well aware of strengths and weaknesses of different languages. Was just vaguely curious