This is what I do now that I no longer have CS problem sets
Snopes.com broke with the usual repertoire of urban legends and posted the following:
The English language has at least one nine-letter word that remains a valid word as each of its letters is successively removed.
Their solution was “startling,” with the parting note that “there may be other equally valid solutions.”
As a computer nerd, I couldn’t resist. With a quick hack, I found 13 words of length >= 9 that can be cut down to one letter, leaving a valid English word each time. (To be fair, I found 12, since “splitting” is a derivative of “splittings.”)
cleansers discusses drownings scrapping splatters splitting splittings startling starvings strapping stringier trappings wrappings
Here’s how they break down: winnowed_words.txt.
Note that “splittings” is a whopping ten letters long.
splittings
splitting
slitting
sitting
siting
sting
ting
tin
in
i
I’m using the /usr/share/dict/american-english-large dictionary from
Debian, ignoring all case and throwing out all words with apostrophes. (N.B.: american-english-large includes some unusual plural constructs like “shes” and “hes”.) I’m only counting “a” and “i” as valid one-letter words. Counting all single-letter words as valid under the self-reference rule bumps up the total by two, adding “carousels” and “flashiest,” but adding no words of length > 9.