English Triplets

I know everyone is excited for the new series kicking off at the Ragbag, but I have some concerns.  Here is how Raynor describes the project:

every week, i will generate a random string of three letters (via this). i will then search for every entry in the oed that contains that string and report back the BEST word there is that fits this criterion.

If Raynor stays true to this process, he’s going to get lots of letter triplets that do not appear in his dictionary.  Clearly, there are 26x26x26=17,576 possible letter triplets that this generation process can spit out, all with even probability.  I can’t speak to the length of the OED, but my word list of choice, SOWPODS which teems with all sorts of jibberish and is surely much larger, has only 7,747 triplets that actually occur.

Thus, 56 percent of the time, we can expect a note from Raynor informing us that his project is methodologically unsound and hopefully next week we’ll be luckier and pick some letters that actually show up in the English language.

[I know the words in SOWPODS and the OED differ vastly, but for the next paragraph we’re gonna pretend they are the same]

And, busy man that Raynor is, I would be dismayed if the generator spit out an “ING” (the triplet that appears most often, 24,958 times), “ESS” (12,064) or “ATI” (12,027).  Really, if he gets any of the thousand sequences that appear in more than 503 words, and he’s really going to have his work cut out for him.  He capitalized “best”, so he really needs to make sure he’s right.

Still, if he modifies how to pick the letter sequences, the Ragbag Word Summer Series shall fit right into the pantheon of Ragbag Word Fun.