Comments on: Three Letter Words

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:09:00 +0000

Thanks Jamie. Fewer characters and infinitely more readable.

By: Jamie Collins

Jamie Collins — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:50:00 +0000

Suggeted code change

Replace

'97 is the ASCII code for lower case 'a'
For i = 97 To 97 + 25

with

For i = ASC("a") To ASC("z")

By: Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:48:00 +0000

Actually, FER is a legitimate Scrabble word (and so are FAR, FIR, FOR, and FUR). Therefore, your “first thought” was correct.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:59:00 +0000

-uck has only ten. But some of them are of a substantially higher quality.

By: Andy Cotgreave

Andy Cotgreave — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:06:00 +0000

@Mpemba
Good work, although you’re straying into the world where pedants might argue you’re cheating! Making any word a plural simply because one can always ask “How many _Septembers_ are there in this sentence?” goes against the spirit a little.

By: Mpemba

Mpemba — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Dick

Ah - indeed: it seems to list Lang and Wang as Proper nouns - the Scots might disagree.

Some "words" Excel accepts are clearly nonsense - such as "zzzz" - but they are for whatever reason in the dictionary.

In English English (UK) the longest Excel accepts (all lower case) is -ays (13) therefore quite rightly excluding Kays (the set of women called Kay), Mays (The month of May in more than one year), Tays (a surname).

However, since "kay" is the 11th letter of the alphabet according to the OED I might have expected to be able to count all the "kays" ...

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:41:00 +0000

Andy -

-ill has 12 (13 counting the proper name Jill)

Bill, Dill, Fill, Gill, Hill, Kill, Mill, Pill, Rill, Sill, Till, Will

By: Andy Cotgreave

Andy Cotgreave — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:32:00 +0000

“-all” was the first example I’ve come up with. I’ve certainly hit 13 once or twice (while on long car journeys!) but can’t remember what the suffixes were.

Excel’s spell checker certainly isn’t the OED, but there are some Scrabble word lists online
(http://www.scrabble.org.au/words/fours.htm)

Dick, if you can do this in code, you’ll answer a question that’s plagued me for sometime, and a virtual beer will head your way.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:52:00 +0000

Excel doesn’t like lang or wang, so it only comes out to 10. Excel isn’t quite the OED though. I have one at 13 and several at 12. I’ll post the code tomorrow.

By: Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel)

Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:34:00 +0000

A couple of notes regarding these two lines from your posted code...

vaVowels = Array("a", "e", "i", "o", "u")
.....
For k = 1 To 5 'should have used 0 to 4 here[

and this line from our VB Note...

But there's no excuse for not remembering that Array produces a zero-based array.

To have avoided the problem you encountered with the For statement, you could have used this instead...

For k = LBound(vaVowels) To UBound(vaVowels)

so that you wouldn't have had to worry about the bounds of the array produced by the Array function. And that is what you should have used because the Array function does **not** always produce a zero-based array... the lower bound is dependent on the Option Base statement. The default for the Option Base statement (for when it is not explicitly specified) is 0; however, if you use this...

Option Base 1

at the top of your code window; then *almost* all arrays created in VB where the lower bound is not explicitly set to something other than 1 would have a lower bound of 1... this includes arrays produced by the Array function. So using 0 to 4, and/or your workaround of using vaVowels(k-1) with specified bounds of 1 to 5 only work for programmers who use an Option Base of 0 (whether explicitly specified or not). I'm guessing you are wondering why I highlighted the word "almost" a moment ago, right? That is because there is an exception to this rule... the Split function **always** produces a zero-based array no matter what the Option Base is set to. So, you could have used this to produce the vaVowels...

vaVowels = Split("a e i o u") 'when a delimiter is not specified, Split uses a space

and then using this "For k = 0 To 4? and "vaVowels(k)" would always work.