This week's challenge comes from Andrew Tuite, of Chicago. There are four countries whose names have one-syllable anagrams that rhyme with "Spain." What are they?
As usual, let's break this one down and determine what tools and resources we need to solve it.
- C: a list of countries
- This is a closed class---we can easily obtain a complete list.
- The United Nations recognizes 195 countries.
- We'll use some heuristic to filter this down to strings that can be anagrammed to a one-syllable word
- Wikipedia claims a handful of 10 and 11 letter words might be pronounced as one-syllable
- I'll limit my list of countries to those with seven or fewer letters
- Note that the anagram must be one-syllable, but the original string might be more than one syllable, as in MASTER --> STREAM
- Anagrammer: a function to anagram strings
- This will need a lexicon to ensure that the anagrams are real words.
- It will also need a pronunciation dictionary to ensure that the anagrams rhyme with Spain.
- We can simply use the pronunciation dictionary as the lexicon, too.
- As we've done in the past, I'll be using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
- Python script: We'll need a bit of scripting to tie all this together:
- Iterate through the country names and filter out strings longer than seven letters;
- Generate possible anagrams and keep only those found in the dictionary;
- Look up pronunciations and determine if they rhyme with Spain. CMU uses Arpabet, which represents Spain as SP EY N
- We'll need to find any anagrams that end with -EY N.
That's the approach I'll be taking. Would you do it differently? Leave your comments below. And check back here after the NPR deadline for submissions on Thursday to see my solution. Happy Puzzling!
The deadline for NPR submissions has passed, so click the spoiler button below to see my solution, and click here to see my script.
