This is getting a little ridiculous. If you can get by with a single literal list of words, write it once. ...if it's long enough to be annoying or becomes a maintenance burden, use the `split()` idiom. ...if that's considered a "hack" or "bad form", then run it in the shell once and copy/paste the result. ...if it might get mutated in a loop, copy it (words[:]). You'd be constructing a new one anyways. ...if it's just too long to maintain in code, just load it from a txt file once at runtime. These are simple engineering solutions to simple engineering problems. As a bonus, they don't require implementation maintainers to redesign their tokenizers/parsers or build a brand-new preprocesser. Python-ideas truly is a unique, wonderful, exhausting place. Back to the "plus/pipe" thread (formerly known as the "PEP 584" thread)...