During this morning’s reading I came across this book listing 100 words American Heritage dictionaries editors feel every High School graduate should know how to use:

“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”

The first thought that struck me was: I wonder how many of these words I’ve used in this blog?

While I could have scrolled through the list and identified which words I could use a Wordpress plugin would provide a faster historical analysis. A plugin could provide where and when these words have been used or not. The plugin could cycle through all the posts and words very similarly to my TD Word Count plugin but instead of counting words it would look for word matches in this list of 100 words and report back its findings.

I got to work.

How many words used?
Out of 100 words on the list and to my chagrin, my plugin reports I’ve only used the following 20 words (also displayed in the screenshot above):

belie (434) plasma (10) euro (39) irony (17) parameter (5) hubris (1) winnow (1) reparation (5) infrastructure (8) facetious (1) soliloquy (1) vehement (4) xenophobe (1) reciprocal (2) plagiarize (2) vortex (2) quasar (1) usurp (2) paradigm (1) polymer (1)

The numbers in parenthesis are the number of published posts and/or pages where the word has appeared out of 1,343,151 total published words from 4,279 posts. The plugin results aren’t lightning fast for a blog this size, although it still returned the stats in a few seconds.

As you might note above the plugin isn’t completely accurate in its current incarnation because it doesn’t take into account every possible word variation (and thus will create some false positives), although it will capture any spelling of the word and cases like impeached is used instead of ‘impeach’. The plugin will falsely identify words on the list like belie with the much more common ‘believe.’ This was intended to be a short little fun hack to give a general idea what words one has and hasn’t used.

Perhaps in a future version, if there is enough interest from others, I’ll improve the accuracy by checking for semantic and lexical relations. For those who give it a try, feel free to let me know what other mistakes it makes.

Possible writer’s exercise
For those with writer’s block or needing a little new post inspiration, this plugin might provide an exercise for finding creative ways to use the words not used yet. The plugin will tell you what words you haven’t used and provide handy reference links to dictionary.com to the definition of the word as the screenshot above shows.

And yes the thought crossed my mind by listing the words I haven’t used yet in this post I’d be using them and the plugin would return that I’d used all the words. That’s cheating, of course, so I’m not going to do that.

This was a fun little Memorial Day programming sidetrack this morning and I decided to share this Wordpress plugin with the rest of the world with pimples in tact. And this post would belie the whole concept of sharing if I didn’t tell you where you could actually get the plugin, wouldn’t it?

The plugin which I’m calling TD 100 Words can be downloaded here.

Now I’m curious, how many of these words have you used? For those without a Wordpress blog you can still play along, just eyeball the list and share how many words you use below.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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