One of the things I enjoyed while learning to program was playing with a spell check library (anyone remember Borland's Turbo Lightning?) and writing various word filters. This is now trivial in python:
words = open('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines() words = [w[:-1] for w in words] # strip newline chars def aeiou(w): # return true if word uses every vowel ... f = string.find ... for c in 'aeiou': ... if f(w, c) == -1: return 0 ... return 1 filter(aeiou, words) ['adventitious', 'aeronautic', 'ambidextrous', 'argillaceous', 'argumentation', 'auctioneer', 'audiotape', 'augmentation', 'aureomycin', ...]
Other ideas: - find palindromes - find the words with the most number of each letter - find words with no vowels - find the word with the most vowels/consonants in a row - make a histogram of letters used - find words whose reverse is a word - build a crossword puzzle solver Most systems have a word list, but perhaps not in the location shown above. Try 'man spell' and look in the FILES section. Brent Burley