I was curious if the words could be used to form any sentences -- here's the corpus organized by part-of-speech. (Many words are missing due to gaps in the corpus I used):
How did they end up out of alphabetical order? It might be worth alphabetizing and collecting singular+plural into single entries; s and es are available, so you can pluralize most nouns (or singularize most verbs). The list has some pairs but not all, for no particular reason.
I’d suggest dropping the capitalization too, it adds duplicates, and can often be used in both senses, e.g., bill, bell, hill, hiss…
Also note there are plenty of nouns here that can be used as verbs and verbs than can be used as nouns.
Now a bonus round: Can anybody possibly do a long work of fiction only using calculator words? Just this post was difficult after losing just a unitary sound!
"Great, thanks for providing the words. Here’s a paragraph and a long sentence using only the words from your list."
Paragraph:
Ellie and Gil see high hills and lush soils as they sell eggs. Bessie, Lizzie, and Billie giggle at the blissful scene, while Bob, with his big bellies, sees sole lilies by the lake. Hobbes and Zoe bless the giggles and sighs from the hill. Ellie, high on glee, sees Leslie and Ellie loose on the hill.
Long Sentence:
Ellie, Gil, and Bobbie, with their big, glib egos, hobble to the hill, see high geese and geese solos, sell blissful lilies and lilies, see his giggles and giggles, sees solos, sees shell solos, sell loose, high eggshells, sell soles, sell high heels, lose high heels, lose loose lilies, and see highs, high on high hills.
Numeric Equivalent:
Ellie (371173), Gil (617), and Bobbie (860778), with their big (618), glib (6178), egos (3760), hobble (4607713) to the hill (411), see (335) high (4614) geese (63335) and geese (63335) solos (50505), sell (7735) blissful (817557981) lilies (511173) and lilies (511173), see (335) his (517) giggles (61977619) and giggles (61977619), sees (3355) solos (50505), sees (3355) shell (53477) solos (50505), sell (7735) loose (53350), high (4614) eggshells (355435517), sell (7735) soles (50535), sell (7735) high (4614) heels (43735), lose (3505) high (4614) heels (43735), lose (3505) loose (53350) lilies (511173), and see (335) highs (46145), high (4614) on high (4614) hills (4115).
Also, fun note: ChatGPT will go into Mr. Burns mode if you emote Simpsons...
I couldn't find an actual calculator lying around, so I used an LLM to quickly hack up a calculator upside-down view simulator. I'm usually a backend engineer, so it was a fun quick hack (done in less than an hour).
Actually I would have simply included a woff2 file with a font that does the job and displayed that text in that font, but I wanted this to fit in a reasonably sized data-url, and didn’t want the extra assets.
A couple of weeks ago a kid comes up to me on the street carrying a calculator, like a kind of rough kid who for some reason was hanging out with a couple of his friends and enamoured with it, but not the kind of nerdling one would expect to be playing with a calculator on the street. He goes (giggling to self) “hey mate what’s the square root of 64,128,064“ clearly hoping to catch me out with some piece of mathematical hilarity… but naturally I’ve been that kid in my youth and snapped back to him, before cycling off:
“8008”
He actually thought I was a maths genius and shouted “Albert Einstein come back” not realising that I just did sqrt(64) in 50 microseconds and then 450 microseconds of schoolboy humour derivation. Probably more like a Feynman approximation than an Einsteinian, but maybe he’ll learn that in decades to come. Good job his pocket calculator couldn’t square 58008 or 5318008 else I probably wouldn’t have grokked it.
Since apparently this list allows decimals (bozo: 0.208), why does the regex need to exclude words ending in two o's? Words like "boo", "goo", and "igloo" can be made with the same rules, and it's a simpler grep -i '^[izehsglbo]\+$' /usr/share/dict/words
Here's a one-liner to generate the list of single 8-letter hexable words from the dictionary. It doesn't include 0xcafebabe or 0xdeadbeef due to those being 2-word phrases. Of course, you can change the 8 to a 4 to make the list of 4-letter words, or change the 8 to an asterisk, so you can pick your own word combos.
0) any businesses are successfully using calculator numbers in their marketing? Like a clown service that hands out business cards with their phone number 5376616?
1) there are any non-English languages with a substantial amount of calculator words? It's not like there's some inherent bias the Hindu-Arabic numberals themselves should be expected to have in favor of upside-down English, although the seven segment display was developed in the US, so perhaps there's some argument to be made from that angle.
NOUN 147 slob, Ellie, silo, bile, sell, Gil, belles, highs, Bessie, losses, giggles, Liz, hobo, Leslie, Bob, lies, bellies, soil, Hess, hells, Isis, Gog, Hiss, boogie, holes, bliss, oils, gel, leg, lobes, globes, Gill, Leigh, geese, bogies, bilge, Lizzie, Leo, boil, legs, shoe, shells, Ozzie, giggle, ooze, size, eel, high, bill, gob, hole, hog, soles, libel, Hill, bee, shills, ills, Lois, glee, Bess, lobe, gig, Beebe, sizes, Gogol, sloe, hiss, Ellis, Sol, boos, Ohio, bees, HBO, bobbles, ill, lie, sobs, booze, bibles, Gibbs, hobbies, sighs, shell, isle, bib, Hegel, hills, Zoe, Eloise, Giles, sill, Elsie, Bill, bells, loss, egg, eggshell, bills, hoses, Shiloh, siege, Bible, solos, sigh, Hillel, logs, hose, lobbies, hill, log, hob, bell, shoes, Lee, gloss, heels, Hobbes, bosses, soils, solo, Oslo, hoes, goose, oil, Bell, blob, goggles, Eli, sole, ego, silos, hogs, lilies, Billie, gibes, ell, hell, shill, globe, oblige, loose, eggs, gibe, boss, heel, Bobbie
VERB 34 sells, loses, Lie, boil, sell, ebb, lob, seize, solo, begs, see, ebbs, sizzle, beg, lie, besiege, ooze, size, goes, hole, lies, hobble, bog, obsesses, soil, boils, loose, bless, solos, sigh, gobbles, shies, lose, sees
ADJ 9 sole, loose, ill, high, less, glib, big, beige, eligible
ADV 5 loose, ill, less, high, else
PRT 4 gosh, hello, see, hell
X 3 his, Les, les
DET 1 his
PRON 2 his, she