Letter Studies
Letter Studies is an experiment in word study techniques. Inspired by the Old Town Scrabble "The Gees" list, the letter study begins a collection of searches for studying words containing a selected letter. The initial letter study screen provided buttons for these searches. Now the whole form loads the results in a collection of boxes. The initial study starts with the short words (2-5 letters), high value fours and fives, words with an odd second letter, high probability sevens and eights, and searches of words with that letter and selected endings.
Although this is dubbed letter studies, you can also study letter combinations, such as CH, SH, etc. In those cases, there are no results for odd second letters, and probably will not have doubles for that combination. One exception is for PH, which does return PHPHT. The Go button is only for searches other than the selected letter. The odd second letter is a personal configuration rather than totally calculated. I do searches of each letter and omit words with the most common second letters. You could even use this screen to study whole words. For example, searching for JACK will show words with hooks, sevens, eights, and even some extensions (under Is a Hook).
All search boxes include context menus that allow you to copy or save the list, or open in a separate window. Lists also respond to sort options in the ribbon.
A Custom list is also available, with a list of options for your own searches. For example, the IsHook search returns words that have the selected letter as a hook, and you can also search for words which have this letter as a unique hook.
The custom list supports the following searches:
- Contains Letters
- Begins With
- Ends With
- Is a Hook
- Is Front Hook
- Is Back Hook
- Is Unique Hook
- Has No Hooks
- Has Two (anywhere in word)
- Is Doubled (two together in word)
- Inserts (between two other words)
The custom list also has a more detailed context menu enabled so you can do other searches or copy/save the list results. Selected words in this list also shows stats for that word. Since the size of the display of hooks can vary, I've enabled expansion of those lists, and added horizontal scroll bars. Simply widen the window to view the full width. There is no toggle to show hooks for the selected words.
The Prefix and Suffix column of results show only four common endings (EN, PRE, ION, and MENT), but you can select one of more than 100 other prefixes or suffixes or enter your own. Again, if you have to type in an prefix or suffix, press Go to begin the search.
I will probably expand this search option, though many letter studies can also be done in the Combination search using Contains letters, and adding filters. Hint: To study words with three of the same letter, you could use the Pattern search and enter *G*G*G*, or whatever the letter is.