I was listening to Tom Lehrer's "Silent E" (one of my favorites; I'm always happy when that pops up on my iPod), and decided to figure out how many pairs of words differ only by a trailing 'e'.
So I whipped up this nerdstrosity. I felt I had to share:
perl -e 'my %words = (); my @ewords = ();
while (<>) {
chomp();
$words{$_} = 1;
push(@ewords, $_) if (/e$/);
}
foreach my $eword ( @ewords ) {
(my $noe = $eword) =~ s/e$//;
if ( defined($words{$noe}) ) {
print "$noe -> $eword\n";
}
}' /usr/share/dict/words
4 comments:
Well, how many?
Too many loops:
my %words = ();
while (<>) {
chomp();
if (/e$/) {
my $eword = $_;
(my $noe = $_) =~ s/e$//;
if (defined($words{$noe})) {
print "$noe -> $_\n";
}
}
$words{$_} = 1;
}
cnoocy: 461 from my Ubuntu dictionary. But not all of them are from silent 'e's. 348 non-capitalized words.
A bunch were like 'ax -> axe', and a number were latinate plurals (caesura -> caesurae) or like 'franchise -> franchisee'.
I did like 'butt -> butte' and 'rot -> rote'.
Kevin: I didn't want to assume that the word list was already sorted!
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