Having fun with words

One exceptionally cool thing about Debian is that you can run the following command:

sudo apt-get install iamerican-insane

What does that get you? It gets you the iamerican-insane word list, which is described in the package meta info as the following:

Description-en: American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict
This package provides the file /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane
containing a list of English words with American spellings.
This list can be used by spelling checkers, and by programs such
as look(1).
.
This is an even larger list than the one installed by wamerican-huge,
and possibly contains invalid words (as well as words that are very
uncommon). Nothing prevents you installing both (and others) at the
same time.
.
There are also -small and standard versions of this word list,
and there are wbritish* and wcanadian* packages as well.
Homepage: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

The long-and-short of it is that, after installing this, you get this wonderful file in /usr/share/dict called american-english-insane which you can then do fun things with. For example:

egrep '^.+udinous$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane |less

Gets this really cool list of all words that end with the string “udinous”, many of which are really cool. For example, instead of saying that something is high, you can say that its altitudinous. Or instead of saying something is black, you could say that its nigritudinous.

For a full understanding of the syntax of the matching expression consult a regular expression reference.

This is more fun if you have an online account with your local library which links with the online Oxford English Dictionary for free access, where you can look up words and even see really cool usages of them, sometimes going back to middle English (none of these words here will since they are all French/Latin-based).

Another fun search I just did through the insane list was for iously with some of the results being: excrementitiously, flagitiously, hyperhilariously (not in OED), mordaciously, noncontumaciously (not in OED), noneuphoniously (not in OED), overabstemiously (not in OED), quadrifariously, and tralatitiously.