c4countdown

Hello all,

I know, me again, asking questions again, and you'll probably tut loudly and say I should have been able to find this out by myself, but I searched on here and got a squillion results, then searched on Google and got eff all...

I'd really love some word lists - particularly stems - and I've been told there is this thing called CountMax (also something called CountGen?) which will do all this for me and more... but I'm buggered if I can find it.

Anyone care to help a hopeless case?

CountMax (linked from http://www.apterous.org/cdb/recapwriter.php) won't really make word lists for you, it's just a solver. CountGen was a primitive precursor to Apterous which you can also find on CDB but it's not much use really. You probably want something like Lexpert.

Ooh, that's interesting, thanks Charlie.

I already have Lexpert for Scrabble purposes (not for playing, but for my brief attempts to design the perfect game) but I thought it was only any good for that. Didn't realise it contained the right dictionary for Countdown.

If I were to look on Countdown Wiki, might I find any useful word lists apart from the 7s-that-are-never-the-max list? Anyone have any useful word lists, or good sources (apart from Mark Tournoff's book), that they'd like to share?

Clare Sudbery wrote:I already have Lexpert for Scrabble purposes (not for playing, but for my brief attempts to design the perfect game) but I thought it was only any good for that. Didn't realise it contained the right dictionary for Countdown.

It doesn't, but you can get that from elsewhere and hack the two together. I don't really know how that's done (I tend to roll my own programs when I want wordlists) but someone here can probably help.

Clare Sudbery wrote:If I were to look on Coutndown Wiki, might I find any useful word lists apart from the 7s-that-are-never-the-max list? Anyone have any useful word lists, or good sources (apart from Mark Tournoff's book), that they'd like to share?

I planned at some point to put more "educational" material on the wiki but never really got round to compiling it. I think a lot of players have their own word lists but, for obvious reasons, are not particularly keen to share until their time on the programme is over.

All most useful, thank you.

After having been away and had a bit of a tinker, I have another qu...

On Apterous, the Stemmer facility just gave me this list:

SATINE+A: TAENIAS [S]
SATINE+B: BASINET [S]
SATINE+C: CINEAST [S]
SATINE+D: DESTAIN [S], DETAINS [S], INSTEAD [S], SAINTED [S], SATINED [S], STAINED [S], TIENDAS [S]
(etc)

What does [S] denote? At first I thought it meant you could append an S, but then I noticed every single word had it, and (for instance) I'm pretty sure DETAINSS isn't a word...

Clare Sudbery wrote:After having been away and had a bit of a tinker, I have another qu...

On Apterous, the Stemmer facility just gave me this list:

SATINE+A: TAENIAS [S]
SATINE+B: BASINET [S]
SATINE+C: CINEAST [S]
SATINE+D: DESTAIN [S], DETAINS [S], INSTEAD [S], SAINTED [S], SATINED [S], STAINED [S], TIENDAS [S]
(etc)

What does [S] denote? At first I thought it meant you could append an S, but then I noticed every single word had it, and (for instance) I'm pretty sure DETAINSS isn't a word...

Try clicking on it.

Aha!

Didn't think of that. Thank you.