This seems like something that would be fun to solve with Perl:
RAY: I have, written on a piece of paper in front of me, a word that
is plural and also masculine. Now, I know we don't have masculine and
feminine words in English the way we do in Italian or French. But,
we do have words that connote masculinity. For example, the word
"boys" is a plural word that connotes masculinity. The word I have written here is like "boys." It's masculine, and
ends in "s." Not only that, but you change this word from plural to
singular and from masculine to feminine, all by adding an "s" to it! I spent last night reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary,
and I only found one example for which this works.Ok, so I've got a word list, how many words can there be that end in S?
$ grep -ic 's$' /usr/share/dict/words
25998Oy, way too many. But how many end in a double S?
$ grep -ic 'ss$' /usr/share/dict/words
9552Better, but not much better.
If the word in question is in /usr/share/dict/words, then it should be one of the (hopefully) rare words that is a -ss word that, when the last -s is dropped, is also in the larger -s list.
With luck, there will be only one; realistically, this should shorten the list enough that the answer can be found manually.
Can anyone think of a clever way to do this ?
-- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
