Given this input, the function returned the following list of words: Below, we define valid letters for a puzzle as a list of single-character strings, and the center letter as a stand-alone single-character string. Now let’s test the function on a set of actual Spelling Bee puzzle constraints. The function returns the list as output after iterating through ‘wordlist.’ Testing the Function If all of these conditions are met, the word is appended to the acceptable words list. The word must not contain any of the letters that are in the unacceptable letters list.The length of the word string must be greater than 3.The word must not already be in the acceptable words list (to avoid duplicates appearing in the final list).The center letter provided as an argument must be in the word.The list of acceptable words is populated by iterating through ‘wordlist’ and identifying words that meet the following conditions: The function defines unacceptable letters as all letters in the alphabet that are not in the list of letters that it takes as an argument. Then, I created a list of words in the file with the following code structure: For that, I downloaded the ‘words.txt’ file from this GitHub repository. Creating a List of English WordsĪ program for solving the Spelling Bee would need to have some way of recognizing whether or not a word exists in the English language. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, I would ask my readers to only use the information in this article for educational purposes. That would take all the fun out of solving the Spelling Bee, so if I use this program in the future, it will only be after I’ve exhausted every valid word in my vocabulary and am still up at 2AM chasing the Genius rank. Given that the logic puzzle only needed to be solved once before it could be applied to any future word puzzle, however, I’d undoubtedly be cheating if I were to simply run the program on tomorrow’s Spelling Bee challenge. This task transformed a word puzzle into a logic puzzle, and in the sense that there was still some ‘solving’ to do, I don’t think of it as cheating. Today, I decided to solve the puzzle by relying on Python instead of English, and this article will explain how I did it. The goal is to think of as many valid words as possible: as your word count goes up, so does your performance ranking, which lies on a scale from ‘Beginner’ to ‘Genius.’ I have lost an embarrassing amount of sleep some nights in pursuit of that prized Genius status. Image by author, designed to imitate the structure of a Spelling Bee puzzle.
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