Five years or five minutes

$ grep "^...$" CSW12.txt

This gives you a full list of all the three letter words in the wordlist.

Of course, now we want to be able to figure out the scores of the words. The letter scores of the words are easily found on Wikipedia:

• 1 point: E ×12, A ×9, I ×9, O ×8, N ×6, R ×6, T ×6, L ×4, S ×4, U ×4
• 2 points: D ×4, G ×3
• 3 points: B ×2, C ×2, M ×2, P ×2
• 4 points: F ×2, H ×2, V ×2, W ×2, Y ×2
• 5 points: K ×1
• 8 points: J ×1, X ×1
• 10 points: Q ×1, Z ×1

BEGIN {score="0D1G1B2C2M2P2F3H3V3W3Y3K4J7X7Q9Z9"} # score table
/^...$/ { # Match three-letter words
   s=0; # accumulator for scores
   for(i=1;i<=length($0);i++) {
      # Find the current character in the score table
      # move one down for the score and add one
      s += 1+substr(score, 1+index(score, substr($1, i, 1)))}; 
      print s, $1
   }
}

$ awk 'BEGIN {score="0D1G1B2C2M2P2F3H3V3W3Y3K4J7X7Q9Z9"} /^...$/ {s=0; for(i=1;i<=length($0);i++) {s+=1+substr(score, 1+index(score, substr($1, i, 1)))}; print s, $1}' CSW12.txt | sort -nr | head

Notice that she missed out quite a few high-scoring words, and spent five years on this, while it took me a couple of minutes to bash out the script.

My observations are first, that it is clearly possible to compile a list like the article describes without using programming, but it would have taken her a lot less time to learn programming and then compile the list than it probably took her to compile it by hand. In this case, programming is avoidable, but definitely applicable.

I suppose she could also just have downloaded Zyzzyva (a scrabble word-lookup GUI program), but to be honest, I couldn’t get the list above as quickly, because the word scores weren’t in the program by default and I couldn’t figure out how to get them there.

Other implementations

I did a quick Python implementation as well, slightly less suited for one-liners on the commandline, but perhaps a little more legible:

table = {'A': 1, 'B': 3, 'C': 3, 'D': 2, 'E': 1, 'F': 4, 'G': 2, 'H': 4,
         'I': 1, 'J': 8, 'K': 5, 'L': 1, 'M': 3, 'N': 1, 'O': 1, 'P': 3,
         'Q': 10, 'R': 1, 'S': 1, 'T': 1, 'U': 1, 'V': 4, 'W': 4, 'X': 8,
         'Y': 4, 'Z': 1,
         }

wordsandscores = [(sum(table[c] for c in word), word) for word in
                  [w.strip() for w in open('CSW12.txt')] if len(word)==3]
wordsandscores.sort(reverse=True)

for s, w in wordsandscores[:10]:
    print s, w