

The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36 - nrr
http://primes.utm.edu/notes/words.html

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alaricsp
I set my colleages a challenge: write porn using only prime words.

"WIDEST WOMB WOMAN WATCHED PET PERVERT WHIP BLINDFOLDED YIDDISH BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD RUTTED BLINDFOLDED BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD PULVERIZED TRUCKMAN RUTTED TORRID"

"YARDMAN WHIP UNUSED WHELP, TROLLOP SUSPECTED SILKEN RUNT. PUTOUT, PARTED,
LAIN. EVALUATED FETISH,EXPENDED. DISINTEREST."

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syoutsey
I'm a little confused...why did he use base 36 instead of base 26? Aren't
there only 26 letters we need to convert to numbers?

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muck
I guess they think words somehow include numbers

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cvg
There are no numbers in English, but some real languages with latinized
character sets have numbers in them:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sḵwxwú7mesh_language>

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roundsquare
Interesting. Could be fun to combine this with distributions on word length,
etc... and compare the number of primes we see to the expected number of
primes (using the prime number theorem).

Would be funny if we had a tendency towards prime words :)

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eru
Zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen!

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Xichekolas
It seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.

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Hexstream
And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.

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CGamesPlay
Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted
alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list
numerically.

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yan
Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?

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harpastum
Kinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists
organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3
letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any
3-digit number).

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ralphb
My personal favourite:

PRIMETEST

But the list is surprisingly long, so not that surpring that something
concerning primes would be in there.

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yuan
More interesting is what isn't there: so prime is not prime.

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ubernostrum
See also: Richardian numbers.

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kanny96
One-third of the prime words are past participles

    
    
      [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | wc
    
          2560    2560   21156
    
      [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | grep "ED$" | wc
    
           843     843    7594

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bryanl
One of the words is halloween. How fitting.

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imd
I wonder if anyone will use this set of words for constrained writing.

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filosofo
Restriction? Henceforth, demonstration. You'd thought, "what person couldn't
workup contrived composition?"

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mkelly
I already thought "zenith" was a fun word, and this just makes me like it even
more. Yay!

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berntb
Sigh, I thought it would be about PDP-10, the coolest assembler I've ever
seen.

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nrr
It's a shame that neither TECO nor DDT are prime. :(

