News You Can Bruise for 2005 September 7

(5) Wed Sep 07 2005 13:55 PST Word Problems That Turn Out Not To Be That Interesting II: I noticed that the word "begin" has letters that are pretty evenly spaced, or at least they look evenly spaced if you have teeth as bad as mine used to be. B is letter 2, E is letter 5 (+3), G is letter 7 (+2), I is letter 9 (+2), N is letter 14 (+5). I wondered if there were any words (of more than two letters) whose letters were precisely spaced. This is the kind of thing I think about, as you'll recall if you remember the days of The Arbitrary Text Code.

So I wrote a little Ruby script to run against the word list I use for the Eater of Meaning, and it turns out there are such words! But they all have only three letters. Here they are, minus a proper name ("Stu", skip=1).

ace (skip=2)
din (skip=5)
fed (skip=-1)
fox (skip=9)
gnu (skip=7)
jot (skip=5)

I changed it to allow one index of slop and it found a bunch of four-letter words plus "accede" and "deeded". So not terribly interesting. I was hoping to get one really interesting solution like "nowhere/abjurer" or "terra/green" from the rot13 puzzle, so that I could say "what common English word..." like on Weekend Edition, but it is not to be. The vowels are spaced too close together. In the field of two-letter words, though, it is kind of interesting that "me" has skip=-8 and "mu" has skip=+8.