RE- or -ER?

[James Hall]

Which is safer to go for out of RE(verb) or (verb)ER? I just had REDISCUSS disallowed as a conundrum and the answer was DISCUSSER. Is there any way to know which is the right one to go for?

Or do I just have to know?

[Jon O'Neill]

In my experience, the -ER ones are much more likely to be in, even if they sound ridiculous like your example!

[Charlie Reams]

Yep. You get the occasional oddity like RECONQUER but mostly -ER is a much much better guess.

(No, I don't have stats on this. Yet.)

[Simon Myers]

A quick naive count (using my probably slightly out-of-date list) yields 307 RE- and 435 -ER conundrums. Of course, many of them are false positives (like REASONING and REDDENING, or SALTWATER and SCRAGGIER) and some are a win-win (RECLAIMER, REFRESHER). Can't always rely on those though, because there are gotchas like LAUNDERER and FRUITERER.

An accurate count would probably require going through them all by hand.

[Charlie Reams]

And to give you another count considering all words up to nine letters, 2652 can have -ER appended (or -R if they end with E) and only 1266 can have RE- prepended. There are some ways you could further refine this comparison but the factor of two difference probably isn't far off.

But (to make another unsubstantiated claim) it's probably better not to guess at all. Spurious agent nouns are probably the biggest single source of errors in the whole letters game.

[David Williams]

And to give you another count considering all words up to nine letters, 2652 can have -ER appended (or -R if they end with E) and only 1266 can have RE- prepended. There are some ways you could further refine this comparison but the factor of two difference probably isn't far off.

But (to make another unsubstantiated claim) it's probably better not to guess at all. Spurious agent nouns are probably the biggest single source of errors in the whole letters game.

If this is just a simple count I think it could be misleading, because the -ERs will include a lot of adjectives.

The whole area is a minefield, though. I hadn't really tried to rationalise it before, but I suspect my own method if I have to guess is that the suffix is more likely than the prefix. But if I think the suffix could be -ER or -OR, then RE- could be the better bet. And use the last few seconds desperately searching for an anagram.

[Charlie Reams]

And to give you another count considering all words up to nine letters, 2652 can have -ER appended (or -R if they end with E) and only 1266 can have RE- prepended. There are some ways you could further refine this comparison but the factor of two difference probably isn't far off.

But (to make another unsubstantiated claim) it's probably better not to guess at all. Spurious agent nouns are probably the biggest single source of errors in the whole letters game.

If this is just a simple count I think it could be misleading, because the -ERs will include a lot of adjectives.

Yes, both counts will incur some false positives and false negatives as Simon already said. Anyone who wants to sift them, please let me know!

[Charlie Reams]

I tried an experiment using "probable verbs", by which I mean words which can have -ING added to them, and checking both -ER and -ERS forms suggesting that the resulting word is an agent noun and not just an adjective/verb coincidence like BLACK. There are 4265 of these (up to nine letters), of which 1305 take -ER and only 232 take RE-. So that's a difference of around 5.6 to 1.

[Rhys Benjamin]

This sounds like my french exam.

Verb: Faire
Je ?
Tu ?
Il/Elle ?
Nous ?
Vous ?
Ils/Elles ?

Verb: Regarder

Je ?
Tu ?
Il/Elle ?
Nous ?
Vous ?
Ils/Elles ?

Vous avez sept jours.
(You have 7 days)

[David Williams]

I tried an experiment using "probable verbs", by which I mean words which can have -ING added to them, and checking both -ER and -ERS forms suggesting that the resulting word is an agent noun and not just an adjective/verb coincidence like BLACK. There are 4265 of these (up to nine letters), of which 1305 take -ER and only 232 take RE-. So that's a difference of around 5.6 to 1.

That sounds like an improvement to what you did earlier. But are you saying there are 1266 words that take a RE- suffix, only 232 of which are "probable verbs" (doubtless including words like STING and STORE)? So what are all the others?

[Charlie Reams]

But are you saying there are 1266 words that take a RE- suffix, only 232 of which are "probable verbs" (doubtless including words like STING and STORE)? So what are all the others?

ITYM "thanks for your work so far, now I have another question."

Mostly they're inflections of other verbs, like ABSORBS. Obviously REABSORBS exists but there's no ABSORBSING, which is correct because this verb was already counted once. At a glance, not many are interesting.

Also I just noticed a mistake in my earlier stats, the correct figure is 2111 for -ER and 353 for RE- of 6510 total, which increases the ratio slightly to 6:1.

Here's a breakdown by length of the base word.

Code: Select all

length  words   -er     re-
2 	   12 	   3 	  3
3 	   209 	  87 	 20
4 	   1059 	 484 	102
5 	   1244 	 528 	92
6 	   1528 	 494 	73
7 	   1384 	 392 	63
8 	   1074 	 123 	0

Note that RE- registers as zero for 8-letter words, because the resultant words are more than nine letters long and therefore irrelevant, whereas 8 letter words ending in E may still form -ER words. You can mentally discount these if you like, the ratio remains definitive.

[Gavin Chipper]

This thread is what it's all about.

[David Williams]

ITYM "thanks for your work so far, now I have another question.

No, I think it's more like "Respond to my every whim, or I'll flounce off, and you'd miss me".