The first 26 primes (2, 3, 5, ...) can be put in correspondence with the letters A through Z, so the common English word CAB would be the product 5 * 2 * 3 = 30. Using this code, what´s your guess to a common English word that comes closest to a million ? I found one very, very close. Can you beat mine ?

To help you, here are the 26 first primes and their correspondence to the alphabet :

 2 - A      3 - B      5 - C      7 - D     11 - E
13 - F     17 - G     19 - H     23 - I     29 - J
31 - K     37 - L     41 - M     43 - N     47 - O
53 - P     59 - Q     61 - R     67 - S     71 - T
73 - U     79 - V     83 - W     89 - X     97 - Y     101 - Z

(In reply to re(2): computer soln -- spoiler by Nosher)

Nosher,

I built mine up over a period of time, beginning with several free standard crossword-dictionary files I found online, that had both singular and plural word forms. I visited sites such as http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html and http://phrontistery.info/index.html and lists of American cities and towns and foreign countries and cities and provinces, scientific terminology, literary expressions, historical terms, etc.  

I wrote a 2-phase program that parses any text file into an alphabetical list of individual words and (after my manual review of the list) applies it to my dictionary, which now contains 360,322 words. I run this program against several news files daily. My dictionary now includes all kinds of strange words (like "zzztt"). A really unabridged dictionary. 

I would offer to email this dictionary as an attachment to anyone who wanted it, except that I would be afraid that someone (JC ?) could mistakenly accuse me of transmitting a virus. I'd probably be too nervous to do that.

 

Edited on July 19, 2005, 12:43 pm

Posted by Penny on 2005-07-19 10:45:56