Friday, May 07, 2004

(timesuck) whacker tally

The WLS office across the hall got me introduced me yesterday to GoogleWhack. The game is to enter two words in Google that produce one and only one page as a search result. What counts as words is defined by what's in dictionary.com, which you can tell by whether or not the word is highlighted as a blue link at the top of your search results (on the light blue bar, at the far right). Googling "whacker tally", for example, is a legal attempted whack because both words show up in the search results; however, "whacker tally" at this moment brings up 1530 results, or 1529 too many to be an acktual whack. It's easy to come up with a two-word search that yields < 5 hits, and it's easy to come up with a search that yields 0 hits, but one and only one is harder (especially since the hit cannot be one of the various wordlists available on the net).

There are basically two different ways to play: the simpler way is to just use any two particular uncommon words without any thought about their relationship; the snootier way is to only use pairs of words that, taken together, are indeed meaningful. I played it the snootier way; it took maybe an hour to rack up ten whacks, all of which were adjective-noun pairings:

  1. grayish sphygmomanometer

  2. amaranthine sunfish

  3. fussbudget mallards

  4. puce bastinadoes

  5. abecedarian syllabuses

  6. cuckolded jaywalker

  7. contemptuous basenjis

  8. slithery bulrushes

  9. dilatory poetesses

  10. hemophiliac quislings
No I was not pleased with how many times I had to resort to pluralized nouns.