A Sufficient Reason.

[swestrup]

I was searching the net trying to figure out how to find obscure english words with unlikely pairs of initial letters, like 'cn' or 'bd', or even 'rh' (which isn't THAT rare).

I didn't find what I was looking for, but I found forthright's list of his 50 favorite words. Its truly an excellent list, so I friended him.

Comments

[labyrinthman.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find his stuff pretty fascinating.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

forthright is awesome. I suspect you and he will get along. He and his charming wife are moving back to Montreal in about three weeks' time, too. :)

[sps.livejournal.com]

There's this thing called a dictionary, Sti. In it they arrange words alphabetically, starting from the front? ;)

So you need the bottom end of a trigraph table (hm...) and the OED... and a lot of patience in looking for non-existent words starting with qqh.

Honestly, why not take a word-list and just scan it for initial trigraphs that appear in no more than a dozen words?

[I like ctenophore. Bdellium is a no-brainer, as is cnidarian. But perhaps these don't count as 'obscure', being the sorts of words that one runs across now and then. I didn't know cnemial or cnapan until I just went looking... insufficient interest in medicine on both counts, perhaps?]

[swestrup]

Alas, I have no sufficient dictionaries. I don't own a compact OED, despite lusting after one for ages, and most of the word lists I've found online lack words like bdellium.

I strongly doubt its in any of the dictionaries I own either, unless its in the etymological one... Yup, its in the Oxford Etymological, although it gives is origin as 'unknown'.

You realize that YOU are the reason I was looking for these words. You told me once that you saw an alphabet listing that started something like:

A is for aardvark
B is for bdellium
C is for cnidarian
...

And I was curious what the 'most obscure' entries for each line would be.

[forthright.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I've friended you back.

While there's no really simple way to use the Phrontistery to search for words, Table 3 of the stats page for my word list gives values for the number of words in my list starting with each two-letter combination. As well, you could always use Onelook.com, which is a wildcard-enabled searchable meta-dictionary.

[swestrup]

Thanks. I should point out that the aforementioned table 3 does not indicate which letter is the first, and which the second. You may want to fix that. I also note it has no 'aa'-starting words, so my guess is you've excluded animal names like 'aardvark'.

I shall now go check out onelook.com, which I had not heard of before.

[forthright.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. There is a brief description of how table 3 works at the top of the page, but I agree it could be a lot clearer. There are actually a few 'aa' words in the dictionary from the latest revision (the stats aren't entirely up-to-date): 'aam', 'aardwolf' and 'aasvogel', but not 'aardvark', which I suppose I must have considered to be too common.