3 words that look alike but don't rhyme

Hello Puzzlers! Time for this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR:

This week's challenge: This week's challenge comes from listener Jim Bricker, of Wayland, Mass. Think of three common six-letter words that have vowels in the second and fifth positions. The last five letters of the words are the same. Only the first letters differ. And none of the words rhyme with either of the others. What words are they?

It's nice to see a puzzle that doesn't follow the familiar format (take a thing from Class A and apply a defined transformation to get a thing from Class B).

How should we approach this puzzle and what resources do we need?

• Lexicon
• I'm using this list of the top 20k most frequent English words:
• https://github.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/blob/master/20k.txt
• Pronunciation dictionary
• We need a list of pronunciations of words in the English language, and I'm using this one:
• https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict/blob/master/cmudict.dict
• It has 135,154 pronunciations, so it's safe to assume this will cover any words we've found in the 20k word lexicon.
• A python script

We want our script to do the following:

1. Read in the lexicon.
2. Keep only 6-letter words.
3. Keep only those with (orthographic) vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y) in the 2nd and 5th position.
4. Group remaining words into lists where each list contains words that share the same final 5 letters.
5. Keep only the word groups that contain 3 words or more.
6. Iterate through the groups and retrieve each word's pronunciation(s) from the pron dict.
7. For each pronunciation in the group, compare the (phonetic) vowels. (If two pronunciations have distinct vowel sequences, they do not rhyme.) Print out any groups where at least 3 words have distinct vowels sequences. This should give us the solution.

I've done exactly this, and indeed it is returning the solution. It's also returning a few false solutions, like this one:

[('borrow', 'B AA1 R OW2')]

[('morrow', 'M AA1 R OW0'), ('sorrow', 'S AA1 R OW0')]

[('morrow', 'M AO1 R OW0')]

For my money, these pronunciations more or less do rhyme. That may say something about my own dialect, but I'm confident that another solution is better, and I'll share it after the deadline this Thursday. In the meantime, if you'd like to see my script, you can find it here. Good luck and happy puzzling!

--Levi King

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