Early in his career, Henry James wrote an unremarkable novel, a romantic comedy called Confidence.  In one scene, the protagonist Bernard takes a bath in the sea and rests on the beach.  Contentment washes over him until he glimpses a young woman from his past whom he had wronged.  Here’s how James describes that transition:

This sentence may seem unremarkable to human readers, but a computer program I wrote found it to be interesting.  Why?  Because it contains a hidden acrostic, a word formed from the first letters of consecutive words:  “bathwater”.

Did Henry James intend to hide “bathwater” in this sentence?  Probably not—it’s very likely a coincidence that the starting letters of the words he chose happen to spell out another word, and it’s just a bonus that the word is related to the text.  It’s mathematically rare for a sentence to contain a word longer than 5 letters “hiding” in plain sight like this, but a book’s worth of sentences is likely to contain a few such surprises.

Easter Eggs tab

In a bid to bring all of these surprises to the surface at once, my program scanned 150 million sentences from the 75,000 public domain books that make up Project Gutenberg, hunting for all of the words in OneLook’s beefy vocabulary that are embedded as acrostics in these texts.   It found thousands of them, and I’ve added them all to a new tab on OneLook called “Easter eggs”.  The tab only shows up when you search for a word that appears somewhere as a hidden acrostic in one of these books.   This will tend to work for any 3-, 4-, or 5-letter word you can think of, a fair number of 6-letter words, and a few thousand lucky longer words.

Some examples!

“WITCHCRAFT” at 10 letters is one of the longest.   I found it embedded within an innocuous 1914 memoir by Frederick Sadleir Brereton, a British army officer and children’s author:

Did the poet John Greenleaf Whittier know that he was committing TREASON when he wrote “the rare entertainment and show of Nature” in Margaret Smith’s Journal?

Thoreau embedded ABSTRACTS—“and birds seek their roosts and cattle their stalls”—in his essay A Winter Walk.  (I have to wonder if this one was deliberate;  the guy did love wordplay.  Any Thoreau scholars out there?)

I haven’t looked at all of the long words that have Easter eggs yet—I’m letting them surprise me as I use OneLook myself—but here are a few that have amused me so far:  spacious, whitewash, marinates, dictating, amphitrite, Breitbart.  

Shorter words like “GRAPE” are typically found many times in the corpus.  It is hiding in phrases like “gentle reasoning and persuasive exhortations”, “gorgeous raiment and profuse expenditure”, and “grow rich and powerful enough”, among others.   (This illustrates how the feature might be useful to come up with mnemonic phrases to remember passwords.  But I don’t recommend making “grape” your password.)

This week’s contest

If your name is short, you’ll probably find it hiding out in many books.  “JOHN” is hiding in literature as “jury of his neighbours”, “judges of human nature”, “jumble of Hindu notions”.   My own name “DOUG” appears as “doctrine of universal grace”, “determination of ultimate good”, “demonstrations of uncommon gratitude”, and, less pleasantly, “demon of unlawful gain”.    (Note that OneLook only shows the first 20 matches if there are many;  we’d run out of bytes otherwise.)

This week’s contest, for a OneLook mug or equivalent gift card, is to find an easter egg acrostic of your first name or last name that suits your personality.   I’ll pick the answer that makes me laugh the most, which I will measure scrupulously and scientifically.  If your name doesn’t produce any results in the “Easter eggs” tab, try a shorter nickname, or the name of your pet.  Just reply to this email with your findings to enter.

Colors

Speaking of our contests, and speaking of eggs, last week I asked you to use OneLook’s new “Colors” tab to find the word whose top 5 associated colors are, in exactly this order: white, brown, beige, cream, and pastel pink.  

Kevin from Phoenix, Arizona, was the first to answer correctly:  egg. “I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw it,” he reported to me, which is exactly what I was going for.   On the linked page you’ll see the full list of colors that are most commonly associated with egg.  Although there are many kinds of egg, when you hear the word you probably picture a raw, uncracked chicken egg, outrageously expensive these days, the kind of egg that we turn into breakfast food (the first few colors) or hide at Easter (the pastels).  

Word games from around the Web

• Betweenie:  I think I’ve just now reached my limit of “guess the 5-letter word” variants, but this one snuck in under the wire.  You find a secret word by making guesses that progressively narrow the alphabetical range of possibilities to a single answer.  It’s what we in the computer-whispering business call binary search.  It’s not hard but it’s surprisingly relaxing.

• Wiblet:   Just a well-designed word search variant.   A twist is that you’re racing against the clock—a bit stressful—but when you find longer words you get a time bonus.

• WhichYear:   Okay, this one isn’t a word game at all, but you’ll probably like it.  You simply have to guess which year a photo is from.  It’s like the extraordinarily popular GeoGuessr, but for time rather than space.  (There are some existing executions of this concept, like ChronoPhoto and TimeGuessr, but I think WhichYear is a smoother play.)
  

That’s all for now.   May your day be sunny-side up and your week be over easy!   ‘Til next time,

Doug @ OneLook