Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Highly Probable

So since I got a laptop for Christmas, I've actually been using Zyzzyva for most of my word study, rather than the flashcard pile from my dashboard. Of course, for the most part, my method of adding words to my 'cardbox' has still been pretty random- anytime I see a word I don't know, I'll pretty much add it. Words that I miss when I review my games also get added, and I've been going through the 4s to see what I don't have down. Over the last few years, by virtue of probability, I've learned most of the highest probability seven letter words, either by going through the stems or just learning them when I've missed them.

However- I realized that maybe I should start looking at lists of the most probable words and seeing if there are any on there I don't know- so I whipped up a list of the top 1000 sevens. I wasn't surprised that most of them are ones I've already come across. But there were a few in there (mostly ones that don't fall under the 'top bingo stem' category) that I'm pretty sure I've never even seen played. In fact, I was playing a podcast friend on Facebook the other day and he played the first one in this list, which was part of the inspiration to look them up:
OERSTED / TEREDOS
LINGUAE / UNAGILE
CTENOID / DEONTIC / NOTICED
HORDEIN
THEROID
INGOTED
DIOPTER / DIOPTRE / PERIDOT / PROTEID
TOADIED / IODATED (didn't know either of these could end with D instead of S)
SERIEMA / SEAMIER
Ah well, these are all in my cardbox now, so I can't rely on my previous strategy of throwing my opponents off by incorrectly challenging words like these and then playing much less probable words later on in the game to confuse them.

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