Word Games
I have no words to describe this, or who would find this interesting.
Fun & Word Games
If you're like me, and you're bored, and you've got a sheet of paper in front of you, and you don't need that sheet of paper for anything else, you will play games with those words.
One game is just to count up the occurence of each vowel, and make a bar chart. E is the most common letter and makes up about 13% of the letters in a large dataset of text. Sometimes, you'll find that the sheet in front of you has a particularly high or low occurence of E. For example, I've given you the breakdown in this article. Isn't this fun?
Letter usage, with this article in blue and the expected percentage in orange.
If you're lacking a sheet of text, but you still have some spare paper, and you have absolutely nothing better to do, you can play a different game- though it isn't really a game. It's more like a "problem", but not like a real problem, like losing your job, because it doesn't keep you up at night. It's also not a problem like acting awkward in social situations, because it has an answer.
The "problem" is this- what's the longest word in the English language that exists as a word after each of its letters?
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The Problem
I'll start by giving you a bad example: "cat" is not the answer. "c" is not a word, and if it was, "ca" is not a word. Though "cat" is a word, we've already failed the first two tests.
Now a better example: "abs". This is good- "a" is a word. "ab" is a word (though an abbreviation). "abs" is a word. This is good, but is it the longest word? There aren't any letters you can tack onto "abs" to make it longer and still a word, but it's the best we've got so far.
There's an easy way to constrain our possibilities, here. The only one-letter words are "a" and "i", meaning whatever word we end up with has to start with one of those letters, or else it will fail the first test. From here, you can brute force the problem. There are 26 potential two-letter words starting with i: "ia", "ib", "ic", "id", and etc. Of those, only these six are actually words: "if", "id", "I'm", in", "is", and "it". I've heard that some dictionaries or Scrabble rules allow "io", but I have never seen that word used outside of a proper noun and so I reject it. If you can use that word in a sentence without looking it up first, e-mail me and I'll reconsider.
Now, we have 156 (26 x 6) possible three-letter words, starting with "i", that are words after each letter. Now you can try each one: "ifa", "ifb", "ifc", "ifd"... and then you can try again with "a".
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The Solution
Going down the list of "i" words will get you to "imps", "inns", or "inks" as the longest word. If you move on to "a", you can get to "ab", "ad", "am", "an", "as", and "at". This is a lot more fruitful. "ab" turns to "abs", "ad" can turn to "adds". You can also get "ados", "amps", "ands", and some others.
I'll take a moment to complain about Scrabble words, and other such things: "ami" is a French word that is recognizable by English speakers, but not satisfying. An "ama" is "a Japanese diver, usually a woman, who tends underwater oyster beds used in the cultivation of pearls." An "aba" is a traditional Middle Eastern garment. This is a puzzle you solve while you're bored in class, so if you need Google to scrape the bottom of the barrel for you, you're doing it wrong.
So, here's the solution: "antsy". A, an, ant, ants, antsy. There does exist an ax/axe-like tool called an adz/adze, but I think it's obscure enough that I don't want to count it. Not to mention that "adzes" is at best tied with "antsy", so there's no reason to advocate for it because there's a better option- antsy.
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