"Lookie!" I said to Judd, handing him a big long list of all the words [1] whose letters were of the form CVCCVC, where C's are consonants and V's are vowels [2]. Never mind why [3] I had such a listing in the first place.
His immediate response [4] was that CVCCVC was more common than any other pattern. It took me a few moments of contemplation to agree (tentatively).
It took me a few weeks to get motivated enough to write an ugly little C program to see if he was right. Turns out he wasn't, but he was VERY close. Here are the Top Ten:
| Pattern | Number of words |
|---|---|
| CVCCVCC [5] | 4076 |
| CVCCVC | 3642 |
| CVCCVCVC | 2519 |
| CVCVC | 2104 |
| CVCVCVC | 2003 |
| CVCVCVCC | 1885 |
| CVCVCC | 1851 |
| CCVCCVCC | 1784 |
| CCVCCVC | 1589 |
| CVCCVCVCC | 1512 |
1. That is, all the words in the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary.
2. I made the considerable (and considerably ugly) simplification to consider 'y' to be a consonant wherever it occurred. Sorry. I doubt if it affected the most important part of the outcome, which is the rankings at the top of the list.
3. It was because Bob D. had sent around this email about how his new forceably-assigned password was of this form (CVCCVC), and we (a few of us) had had some emails exchanged, wherein we thought of all sorts of creative (mostly obscene) passwords that you could make, and I got to wondering about making entire sentences with CVCCVC words, and then I wondered what I had to work with, so I hunted them down from one of my big wordlists.
4. And I do mean immediate. He hardly gave it a thought.
5. To which Judd's response is "Damn gerunds!" He's right again. 870 of those words end in "ing"; without them CVCCVC would have taken top honours.