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Hooks

2010 December 20
by admin

Here are some stats on the num­ber of words that can be “hooked” from shorter words by adding a sin­gle let­ter.  For exam­ple, as shown in the table below, there are 8938 five-letter words.  2230 of these words can be cre­ated by adding a let­ter to the front of a four-letter word (a front hook) and 4528 of these words can be formed by adding a let­ter to the back of a four-letter work (a back hook).  The total num­ber that can be “hooked” from four-letter words is 5498.  This num­ber drops to 2889 when ter­mi­nal esses are excluded.  The last col­umn is the per­cent­age of the total num­ber of words of a given length that can be cre­ated by hook­ing shorter words (with ter­mi­nal esses excluded).

LENTOTFHBHTHNO S 
2101
310155285397786970.687
4403014412120284920360.505
5893822304528549828890.323
61578822405764684628960.183
724029219187181018234870.145
8297661770103961153131110.105

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