more words ·

If you love words, explore my collection of quotes, spam poetry in the style of ee cummings, π Day Pikus and my favourite excerpts from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

Dark Matter of the English Language—the unwords

Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
—William Shakespeare

Introduction to Unwords

The unwords are words that are not in a language. Here I provide lists of such words, generated using a neural network.

Who knows? You may be the first to read these newly minted words and, armed with this knowlege, you can finally manufacture that exotic malady you've been looking for to help you get out of (or into) a party.

If you're a writer, these lists are a great resource for fictitious character names, places, animals, and cars.

I have a separate page of neologisms that I have created.

The word lists were generated using the char-rnn recurrent neural network. Depending on the list the inputs were a large English dictionary, first names, names of countries or drug names.

This process is fun and the output is often believably hilarious. The application of char-rnn to the creation of new paint names, such as turdly and Ronching blue, is what motivated me to try this out for myself. Ronch on!

So, if you want to explore Conchar and Pobacia and Sinistan or wonder what kind of symptoms are associated with myconomascophobia or are curious about what a cakmiran would look like, explore the lists in depth and use a new word tonight.

I've previously used Markov Chains to generate Tripsum, random ramblings of the mad Donald Trump, or Hitchum, the random ramblings of the brilliant Christopher Hitchens.

Here are a few short lists to get you started. They're all sampled from my list of about 883,500 English unwords.

Absolutely perfect for that time you don't really want to tell someone what you do. Shut down a conversation quickly with necronology or start one with jabimanology.

More tremendous than before, here is a sneak peek at the President's new vocabulary. He was recently seen acting reassoritious, though aides worry about his gabalkerous tendencies.

Building on covfefe, here are the words containing fefe that the neural network discovered, without covfefe being in the training set.

*fefe*: befefeeper brefefent brefefer cofefesce fefee fefeing fefenially fefenialness fefenian fefenianity fefeniate fefeoridy feferate feferated feferating feferats feferial feferiality feferially feferialness feferic feferies feferonious feferoptable fefery fefes gafefeyed gufefer hifefeed tifeferreuse

What do you hold dearest to your heart? You may not want to answer that question but you don't want to say nothing. Assess your moral superiority by loudly professing your views on abobionalism.

It's hard to know who you are. And even harder admitting it in public. Pick something safe from this list of identities. Be the gabdologist you've always wanted.

So, what are your plans for the future? If you're one of those who feel the question is unanswerable with the current option of words, consider fallupify as a course of action. And if you're feeling less productive but still want to appear like you're doing something, go ahead and nonerify.

I've previously been reference as making fun —omes in the New York Times article "Ome," the Sound of the Scientific Universe Expanding.

Well, now I have even more —omes to ridicule. Hilariously, femome and manome are options!