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Vaniver comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Are there any English words with the property that if you rot13 them, they flip backwards? For example, "ly" becomes "yl," but "ly" isn't a word.
I wrote a check for this property for all the words in my system's inbuilt vim dictionary and got the following list:
Rubbish Words:
er, Livy, Lyly, na, ob, re, uh
Interesting Words:
an, fans, fobs, gnat, ravine, robe, serf, tang, thug
Thanks!
I wonder how long it would have taken someone to find one of those without using a script. The human mind is pretty good at word based puzzles, but that's a very short list and a pretty wacky criteria.
I thought about it for about 5 minutes before deciding to script it, and got "fobs" and, annoyingly, dismissed "fres" as not a word.
I imagine if I had been more rigorous it wouldn't have taken long to get all the 4 letter ones, since they all have an internal vowel, which was the obvious place to start looking.
It seems to me like you could generate the 26 pairs-- an, bo, cp, etc.-- and then try to make words out of nesting those pairs (fobs is "ob" surrounded by "fs"). But the hard part is checking whether or not something is a word, and nesting is a pretty weird action unrelated to the sound or content of words.
But now I have idea for a Scrabble-esque game...
A simple google search brings up this page, but it doesn't have anything new.