There are currently 118 elements in the Periodic Table, each Symbol consisting of one or two letters.

Some words can be constructed from the set of these Symbols and some cannot.
For example "calculus" has two "elemental representations":
C Al C U Lu S
C Al Cu Lu S
Moreover we will add one point to a word's "score" for every letter in the word which can appear as the first letter of a two-letter symbol and also as the second letter of a two-letter symbol in different valid elemental representations of the same word.
The word "calculus" scores zero points because the only difference between its two reprentations is C U vs Cu.

On the other hand, "snow" can be:
S N O W
Sn O W
S No W
Since the letter "n" appears both in Sn and No, "snow" gets one point.

Your challenge: If k is the maximum score of the set of all words in the English language, try to find an example word for each score from 1 to k.

(In reply to re(3): Not the scoring method I had in mind, but ... by Charlie)

For the test word 'Narnia' I made a reference to a hypothetical zero-th position, for example 'znarnia'.  In 'Narnia', position 1 is a capital N and could be part of 'Na'.  The only way that position 1 'n' could ever score a point would be if position 1 could somehow be the second letter of an element symbol.   For example zinc, Zn.   'Znarnia' would make that first 'n' a point scorer (if Z by itself were an element).  But of course this fails because 'narnia' has no zero-th position; it's 'narnia' not 'znarnia'.  And if 'znarnia' were the actual word in question, then the first 'n' would be in position 2.

Posted by Larry on 2022-07-17 09:01:09