2023-08-28 ONE VOWEL AND FOUR CONSONANTS For fun with Common Lisp and to help solve a certain puzzle - but just a little bit - I wrote a set of tools to analyse words of just five letters. My source list is based on Hunspell[1]'s en_GB.dic. This dictionary list is available as open source under the MPL. I created my own copy, removed lots of words starting with or containing capitals, Roman numerals, at least 444 duplicates[2], and then some other words. From this sub-set, I see that there are some 667 English words that consist of one vowel and four consonants. In the REPL my utilities can break this down further, like this: ---------------------------------------------------------- vowel number of words with just this vowel sample word ---------------------------------------------------------- a 192 swank e 88 spell i 165 pitch o 106 clown u 104 thumb y 12 glyph ---------------------------------------------------------- The list of five-letter words that have 4 vowels? That would be this: ,---- | ("youse" "yahoo" "queue" "payee" "hooey" "eyrie" "eerie" "bayou" | "aurei" "audio" "aerie" "adieu" "abaya") `---- To round off this post, there is this plot of five letter words versus their number of vowels. Hdqrs, with only consonants, is an abbreviation. I should remove it from the list. The graph is created from this table: ================== # vowels # words ------------------- 0 1 1 667 2 2647 3 662 4 13 5 0 ================== ============ char Hz ------------ R 1289 S 1108 T 1057 L 1019 N 958 C 718 P 651 D 622 H 621 M 576 G 511 B 471 K 390 F 328 W 289 V 228 X 95 Z 89 J 67 Q 54 ============ [1]: https://hunspell.github.io/ [2]: Sample duplicate words include acquisition, affection, bundle, commercial, orthodox, and queue.