cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4516333

Spelion is a word spelling puzzle.

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/spelion

Using just the given 7 letters, you are called to form as many words as possible.

Rules

  • The word that you form must include the center letter.
  • You don’t have to use all the other letters.
  • Minimum length of the word that you create is four letters.
  • Any given letters can be used more than one time in a word.
  • The word list is contained in /usr/share/dict/words, minus words with upper-case letters, words with apostrophe and words containing letters with accent marks.

Name

The name SPELION was just a made up word with letters that could form the root spel(l), while at the same time these letters could appear in a (recursive) Spelion puzzle. The name stuck when I found out that by pure chance Spelion was also an anagram of the greek letter epsilon.

  • Stillhart@lemm.ee
    13·
    1 year ago

    So it’s basically https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee but without the hand-curated answer list?

    I get kind of annoyed by what words they decide to add or leave out on a given day. I feel like the hand curated aspect makes it feel like major BS when you think of a good word that isn’t valid and then you see “woot” and “psht” or shit in other languages as valid words.

    • christos@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      1 year ago

      This is very annoying, especially in wordle.

      For this I chose the word list as is contained in /usr/share/dict/words, minus words with upper-case letters, words with apostrophe and words containing letters with accent marks. One minor thing I have to do is “grep” rid of latin numerals that pop up, like xxxvi,xxiv etc.

    • christos@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      1 year ago

      Thanx for pointing out, it is now fixed in the repo and in the script, however I cannot update the preview image here on Lemmy… so this spelling error will stick out like a sore thumb.

      Update: Fixed.

  • pensivepangolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    Quick pointer you may wanna add to the readme:

    This depends upon /use/share/dict/words which doesn’t necessarily exist on all systems. To try this out on an arch-based district, (Manjaro,) I had to install the package “words” with yay.

      • pensivepangolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        I’ll have you know that fixing things that don’t work for no reason is my favorite thing to do on a distro /s

        While I kid, I have been on Manjaro for 5 years as a daily driver. I know it’s team gets a lot of hate, but it’s been rock solid for me for all my normal usage.

    • offspecA
      2·
      1 year ago

      Was wondering why this didn’t work, thanks!

      • cbarrick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        For Arch based systems, the command is:

        # pacman -S words

        On Debian based systems, I think the command is:

        # apt install wordlist

        The wordlist package is a virtual package. I think it will prompt the user which concrete package (i.e. language) they want to install.

        I’m not sitting at a machine to test these commands out.

        • christos@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          1 year ago

          Thank you for this response. I will mention /use/share/dict/words as a dependency for this script in the README. However, as I am not an Arch user, and thus not familiar with aur and respective commands, and as installing this dependency would be beyond the scope of this project, I will ommit giving precise instructions on how to install this package.

  • christos@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    A couple of interesting features:

    • The selection of letters is random, so, the number of words - solutions is also random. However the user can configure the range of the number of words - solutions, editing the ~/.config/spelion/spelion.config file. That means that the puzzle can have e.g. between 10 and 30 solutions, or between 50 and 100 etc.
    • The user can avoid the frustration of not ever knowing the right answers when no other solutions come to mind: with the W option the user can browse the list of all possible solutions to the puzzle.

    Thank you for your feedback, any other suggestion/correction/input is most welcome.