Longest Word With Just Half a Keyboard?

As some of you may know, I’ve been ill for the past few weeks now, and hence not working or podcasting. I spend a lot of my time doing nothing because I have no energy and often a headache, but when my head is clear I have a lot of thinking time since doing physical things is not possible. I even need to be careful not to type too much or my arms get very sore!

Anyhow – yesterday Bren Finan was chatting with me when he noticed that ‘yesterday’ uses only keys from one half of the keyboard. Which got him, and hence me, wondering if there was a longer word that can be written with just half a keyboard. (The quick-witted among you will probably spot that ‘Yesterday’ doesn’t actually count because the ‘y’ is on the wrong side of the divide on ergonomic keyboards.)

As I say, the conversation got me thinking, and I mentioned it to Connor P when I was chatting to him later, and during that conversation the idea came to write a program to get the answer! The problem then was that I’d need a dictionary file. Connor soon found the answer on Google, the Mac has a built-in word list in /usr/share/dict/words! So, all it took was a few lines of Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my $longestLeft, my $longestRight;

while(<>){
my $validLeft = $_ unless m/[yuiophjklnm]/i;
my $validRight = $_ unless m/[qwertasdfgzxcvb]/i;
$longestLeft = $validLeft if length($validLeft) > length($longestLeft);
$longestRight = $validRight if length($validRight) > length($longestRight);
}

print "Longest left-only: $longestLeft\nLongest right-only: $longestRight\n";

The answer, the longest left-only word is ‘aftercataract’, and the longest right-only word is ‘phyllophyllin’!

Of coruse, once I started thinking about this I also wanted a list of long words, so I did a few teaks to the code, and produced this delux version:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

# declare the needed variables
my $longestLeft, my $longestRight, my $minLength=10;
my @longLeftWords, my @longRightWords;

# loop through the dictionary (file name to be passed as only argument)
while(<>){
chomp;
unless(m/[yuiophjklnm]/i){
# valid left-only word
push(@longLeftWords, $_) if length($_) >= $minLength;
$longestLeft = $_ if length($_) > length($longestLeft);
}
unless(m/[qwertasdfgzxcvb]/i){
# valid right-only word
push(@longRightWords, $_) if length($_) >= $minLength;
$longestRight = $_ if length($_) > length($longestRight);
}
}

# print the results
print "\nLong words (at least $minLength letters) with the left-side of the KB only:\n";
foreach my $word (@longLeftWords){
print "\t$word\n";
}
print "\t\t(total: ".scalar(@longLeftWords).")\n";
print "\nLong words (at least $minLength letters) with the rightside of the KB only:\n";
foreach my $word (@longRightWords){
print "\t$word\n";
}
print "\t\t(total: ".scalar(@longRightWords).")\n";
print "\nLongest left-only word: $longestLeft (".length($longestLeft)." letters)\n";
print "Longest right-only word: $longestRight (".length($longestLeft)." letters)\n\n";

This gives the following results:

bartmbp:Temp bart$ ./dict.pl /usr/share/dict/words

Long words (at least 10 letters) with the left-side of the KB only:
abracadabra
abstracted
abstracter
Actaeaceae
afterbreast
aftercareer
aftercataract
aftereffect
aftergrass
aftergrave
afterstate
aftertaste
afterwards
Aggregatae
asarabacca
assertress
asseverate
Asteraceae
badgerweed
beaverette
bedaggered
begartered
beggarweed
besweatered
betattered
bettergates
breastweed
cataracted
decerebrate
defervesce
desecrater
desertress
desertward
detractress
devertebrated
ebracteate
effervesce
estafetted
everbearer
Evertebrata
evertebrate
exacerbate
exaggerate
exaggerated
extrastate
extravagate
extravasate
freetrader
Gastraeadae
gazetteerage
grasswards
gravestead
gravewards
reaggravate
reaggregate
reasseverate
redecrease
redefecate
refederate
regratress
Resedaceae
retraverse
revegetate
reverberate
reverbrate
settergrass
stagecraft
staggerweed
starveacre
statecraft
stavesacre
stewardess
streetward
sweetbread
sweetwater
tartarated
terracette
terracewards
tessaradecad
tesseradecade
tesserated
tradecraft
Trastevere
versecraft
Vertebrata
vertebrate
vertebrated
waterstead
waterwards
westerwards
(total: 90)

Long words (at least 10 letters) with the rightside of the KB only:
hypolimnion
hypophyllium
hypophyllum
miminypiminy
phyllophyllin
Plynlymmon
polyphonium
polyphylly
(total: 8)

Longest left-only word: aftercataract (13 letters)
Longest right-only word: phyllophyllin (13 letters)

bartmbp:Temp bart$

This tells me two things, firstly, that Perl is really good at analysing text, because on my 5 year old Macbook Pro that took about a second to run, and second, that there are FAR more words for the left side than the right side.