Have Spreadsheet Will Study

I have been deep in my latest study whim. Aided lately by two things. Firstly, I have picked up a cold (I am blaming Penny for dropping by last week to pass on her bugs). Secondly, my old mouse started to go senile on me and rather than sending off for an identical replacement I decided to save some money and try a different make/model. My old Logitech model was a thumb operated rollerball, and the new Kensington one has the rollerball in the middle. It is absolutely fine for normal use but I am still not mastering it for Bejewelled Blitz - left clicking with thumb does not come naturally after years of doing it differently and I have noticed I have an occasional thumb twitch...

But back to my studying...

I started creating a spreadsheet on the 19th September which was originally just the high scorers (J,Q,X,Z) listing all the base words, up to and including 6 letters, with each of those letters grouped by their position within the words. Another column alongside each column of words to indicate what kind of word it was. Then red text the blockers. And then pink text the non-blockers, no S back hook. And then blue cell fill the verbs that have agent nouns. Then reviewed the word designation columns and standardised on one or two character abbreviations:

n noun

v verb

a comparable adjective

a- non-comparable adjective

av adverb

pl plural

va verb and comparable adjective

na noun and comparable adjective

pp past tense/participle

v* verb that does not behave

n* noun that does not behave

pr pronoun

i interjective

c conjunction

anything else...

and then standardise the column width and cell colour it to make the words clearer...

And then I decided to do K, but only words starting with K and excluding the high scorers...

And then I continued on to the 4 pointers...

And I just kept going, finally finishing with S yesterday afternoon.

73 pages, although quite a lot of white space as I started a new sheet for each letter and quite a few just went a column or two onto a new page. Just need to print it out now.

I have now started on the 7 letter words in decreasing probability order. It will be interesting to see what the list reduces to...