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bryanl
One of the words is halloween. How fitting.
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syoutsey
I'm a little confused...why did he use base 36 instead of base 26? Aren't there only 26 letters we need to convert to numbers?
nrr
Consider hex and base 64. Base 16 takes the first six letters from the alphabet to augment the number of available letters for representing a particular value.

I guess using base 26 would make sense from a strictly alphabetic standpoint, but we've conventionally included the numbers 0-9 as part of the available letters for representation.

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zzkt
by convention in base 36, numbers can be represented by [0-9] and [a-z]. 1(36)=1(10) a(36)=10(10) and z(36)=36(10).
MaysonL
z(36) = 35(10), actually ;-)
mkelly
I already thought "zenith" was a fun word, and this just makes me like it even more. Yay!
imd
I wonder if anyone will use this set of words for constrained writing.
filosofo
Restriction? Henceforth, demonstration. You'd thought, "what person couldn't workup contrived composition?"
ralphb
My personal favourite:

PRIMETEST

But the list is surprisingly long, so not that surpring that something concerning primes would be in there.

nrr
FERMAT is also one. :)
yuan
More interesting is what isn't there: so prime is not prime.
roundsquare
Interesting. Could be fun to combine this with distributions on word length, etc... and compare the number of primes we see to the expected number of primes (using the prime number theorem).

Would be funny if we had a tendency towards prime words :)

eru
Zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen, zen!
Xichekolas
It seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.
Hexstream
And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.
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berntb
Sigh, I thought it would be about PDP-10, the coolest assembler I've ever seen.
nrr
It's a shame that neither TECO nor DDT are prime. :(
alaricsp
I set my colleages a challenge: write porn using only prime words.

"WIDEST WOMB WOMAN WATCHED PET PERVERT WHIP BLINDFOLDED YIDDISH BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD RUTTED BLINDFOLDED BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD PULVERIZED TRUCKMAN RUTTED TORRID"

"YARDMAN WHIP UNUSED WHELP, TROLLOP SUSPECTED SILKEN RUNT. PUTOUT, PARTED, LAIN. EVALUATED FETISH,EXPENDED. DISINTEREST."

kanny96
One-third of the prime words are past participles

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | wc

      2560    2560   21156

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | grep "ED$" | wc

       843     843    7594
CGamesPlay
Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.
graywh
Then you'd just sort by length, too.
yan
Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?
harpastum
Kinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3 letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any 3-digit number).