Word Puzzles.
Will Shortz is a noted puzzle master for the New York Times and National Public Radio who frequently posts challenging word puzzles. Many word puzzles can be solved by iterating through a list of words while checking for characteristics specified by the puzzle. Many word lists exist on the Web and we provide one on the text’s website— any sufficiently large one will suffice. We have not covered file reading in detail yet, so here we provide a function that reads a file named “wordList.txt” and returns a list of words in lowercase. The file has one word per line. For each puzzle, copy this program and write your solution as the puzzle function. Note that the puzzle function has one parameter—the wordList.
(a) The comparative form of the adjective “big” is bigger, and the superlative form is biggest. All three forms (big, bigger, and biggest) are related; however, there exists a root word that is not an adjective that when “er” is appended and “est” is appended, the result is a set of three words whose meanings are unrelated. Write a puzzle function that prints out all such triples (root, root + “er”, root + “est”). Scan through your list to find a set of triples that are unrelated to each other.
(b) Find an uncapitalized, unhyphenated word that contains all but one of the letters of the alphabet from “l” to “v” (“lmnopqrstuv”).
(c) What word consists of two consecutive pronouns? This list of pronouns will be helpful.
pronouns = ['thou', 'thee', 'thine', 'thy', 'i', 'me', 'mine', 'my', 'we', 'us', 'ours', 'our', 'you', 'yours', 'your','he','him','his', 'she', 'her', 'hers', 'it', 'its', 'they', 'them', 'theirs', 'their']
(d) What six-letter word has its meaning reversed when its first letter is changed from “c” to “h”? Print out the candidates and then select by hand.
(e) Find an uncapitalized, seven-letter word, containing just a single vowel that does not have the letter “s” anywhere within it.
(f) The word “mimeographs” contains all the letters of “memphis” at least once. Find other words that also contain all the letters of “memphis”.
(g) Find a word that contains the string “tantan.”
(h) The word “marine” consists of five consecutive, overlapping state postal abbreviations: Massachusetts (MA), Arkansas (AR), Rhode Island (RI), Indiana (IN), and Nebraska (NE). Find a seven-letter word that thas the same property.
(i) When you are writing in script, there are four letters of the alphabet that cannot be completed in one stroke: “i” and “j” (which require dots) and “t” and “x” (which require crosses). Find a word that uses each of these letters exactly once.
(j) There are four words that contain the consecutive letters “nacl”. Find them.
(k) Find a word that contains the vowels “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” and “u” in that order.
(l) Consider the word “sure”. If we asked you to add two pairs of doubled letters to it to make an eight-letter word, you would add p’s and s’s to make “suppress”. Find an eight-letter word resulting from adding two pairs of doubled letters to “rate”.
(m) Find three words that are spelled the same except for their first two letters, which can be “sw,” “tw,” or “wh.”
(n) Two US state capitals have a prefix that is the name of a month. Find them.