two letter scrabble words
May 14, 2007, 12:36am EDT
I’ve been playing some scrabble lately and to improve my game, I’ve considered memorizing all the valid two letter words. [1] There are 101 words, of which about 60-70 of them fall into the category of not-obvious-to-me. So, I thought it’d be easier to just find words that are comprised of only two letter words. For example, “somehow” would be on my list because so, om, me, eh, ho, and ow are all valid two letter words. After coming up with a list of words, I could then try to form sentences that used only these words to act as a mnemonic.
I started by writing a program to generate a list of words comprised of two letter words. This ended up being pretty straight forward (hint, don’t try to chain together two letter words). Here’s a list of valid words at least 4 letters long.
There are two problems with this list. First, there are two two letter words not included: qi and ki. They’ll just have to be memorized separately. The other problem is that this list is too long. Now the problem is choosing the smallest number of (or easiest to remember) words that include the other 99 two letter words.
Unfortunately, this is the set cover problem, which is NP-complete (the reduction is left as an exercise for the reader). I ended up pruning the list a bit by hand then using a crappy greedy solution. This gave me a final list of 37 words.
Ugh, that’s actually almost as bad as just memorizing the list. Unless of course someone wants to make a few clever sentences out of this.
[1] I play using OSPD4.
Ian Brown at May 20, 2007, 03:12pm EDT
I was playing quite a bit of Scrabble a while back, so I whipped up a little JavaScript flashcard page to help memorize the two-letter words allowed in Scrabble. I keep it on in the background every now and then, just to keep the skills sharpened: Scrabble two-letter flashcards
Ryan at Jun 03, 2007, 01:40pm EDT
Hey.. this is very helpful… I play scrabble and I wanted to know more about Two letter words… Good thing I found this thru the net… Thanx again….
Lance at Oct 25, 2007, 03:27pm EDT
An absolutely fantastic idea … and I like it even more that you decided to make the computer do the work for you. I would’ve just memorized the list … or made up a song comprised completely of unintelligible syllables. Bravo!
Jessica at Feb 04, 2008, 01:38am EST
I really like this idea for a mnemonic! Thanks for posting it. :-)
You’re certainly onto something with “make a few clever sentences out of this;” but would you be willing to publish the list of qualifying three-letter words as well? It’s hard to make sentences with only big words, even if the sentences end up shorter, they don’t flow very gently. Basically, I suspect “easiest to remember” is going to be more useful than “smallest number” if one were to try to create a full mnemonic (and I’m really curious how long it would have to be, to both contain all 101 and also not to be jibberish).
One reason I’m so interested is that I just tried to devise my own way of remembering the twos (my first attempt to rise above natural vocabulary for Scrabble). I gave myself too many rules, and came up with an extremely long - and silly - poem-like substance (http://jexxixa.blogspot.com/2008/02/ai-land-vacation-two-letter-ospd4.html). Definitely too long to memorize! But it was fun anyway, and although I’m a little embarrassed how much time I spent on it, I ended up learning all the words as I wrote it. But it made me want to create something tighter, shorter - that other people could actually remember.
Anyway, how long is the list of valid three-letter words made out of two-letter-words? I’m guessing the exercise is going to be really difficult, but I’d like to try making up some sentences, to see how feasible a fully memorizable story/poem/wordset would be. I think I could figure out how to install perl on my Windows system, but would be grateful if you’d spare me the necessity. :-)
Joe at Jun 30, 2008, 03:20am EDT
If you want to the memorization route, here’s a link that will allow you to practice with flashcards on your browser or cell phone:
http://iflipr.com/deck/menu/9249
Joe