By this I mean two 11 letter words that contain 22 different letters. Do words like these exist?
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2$\begingroup$ My guess would be no, because of the heavy restriction on the vowels. Do you suspect that something like this could exist? $\endgroup$– hexominoMar 7, 2022 at 14:46
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$\begingroup$ I originally misread the problem as finding 11 2-letter words, using each letter at most once. The maximum turns out to be 8: aa, by, de, jo, mm, nu, qi, sh $\endgroup$– RobPrattMar 7, 2022 at 15:50
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1$\begingroup$ Can you please define "word"? What dictionary are we using? Are proper nouns, plurals, conjugations, loanwords, etc. allowed? $\endgroup$– bobbleMar 7, 2022 at 16:33
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$\begingroup$ Pretty much anything should work. $\endgroup$– HyperioxXMar 7, 2022 at 22:20
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$\begingroup$ Hello and welcome, the tour and help center should explain what is on topic here. This doesn't look look like a puzzle or about making a puzzle. Maybe you could edit that in. As for the question of what you define to be a word, and anything should work... Would you accept these two words I've just made up: Abcdefghijk and Lnmopqrstuv ? That's an extreme example, but you really should pick a word source to let answerers know if their words would be valid of not. $\endgroup$– PuzzlingFerretMar 12, 2022 at 2:45
1 Answer
My answer is
No. There does not exist a pair of unique 11-letter English words that both each have 11 different letters and also do not share letters.
My method for finding this answer:
I grabbed all the 11-letter words from http://www.allscrabblewords.com/11-letter-words/ and made a list of words that contained 11 unique letters. This list has 363 words. I then checked each pair of words to see if any pair didn't share letters. Unfortunately, this check revealed 0 word pairs.
The OP asked a secondary question, and my answer is:
Question: Which 2 11-letter words contain the most distinct letters
It took less time than I expected to run through all combinations, but I found 15 pairs of words that have 20 distinct letters. The first pair that also each contain 11 distinct letters are:
downrightly lumberjacks
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$\begingroup$ Would you be able to use this method to find two words that contain the greatest number of distinct letters possible? $\endgroup$ Mar 7, 2022 at 15:24
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1$\begingroup$ It would take a lot longer because the full 11 letter word list is rather large. Finding the greatest number of distinct letters from 2 11-letter words that each have 11 distinct letters is a much quicker ask. $\endgroup$ Mar 7, 2022 at 15:26
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$\begingroup$ I did the same thing as Joel and got the same answer (too slow though). @HyperioxX - Do you mind if I ask what the goal is? It feels like you're trying to do something specific with this. $\endgroup$– willMar 7, 2022 at 15:43
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$\begingroup$ It’s for an eleven letter wordle game, and I’m trying to figure out the best combination of two words to start with. Ideally I don’t really care about q, x, z, and j, but whichever two words cover the most letters are ideal. $\endgroup$ Mar 7, 2022 at 22:18
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$\begingroup$ I ran this search against a larger word list (called "british-english-insane", with more than 1111 words of exactly 11 letters), no hits there either. $\endgroup$– BassMar 8, 2022 at 14:38