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alnwlsn07/31/20253 repliesview on HN

A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.

It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.

[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.


Replies

hidroto08/01/2025

that seems to be in the same vain as this presentation by guy steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 .

autoexec07/31/2025

I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.

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mateo41107/31/2025

I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.

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