What can you do with a list of all words in a language?

My grandmother once told me that she attended a course where the teacher told them that there were three Hungarian words having the suffix “szág”. Two such words are “ország” (country) and “jószág” (livestock), which are both common words. The teacher said he would tell the third one only if he received a bottle of wine, which he didn’t. So when telling the story to me, my grandmother still didn’t know what the third word was.

After hearing this puzzle, I grabbed the official Hungarian spelling dictionary, which contained most Hungarian words, and started skimming the pages. I didn’t make it through even the letter “a” of course. But I found the word “vigaszág” (Losers Bracket), which was among the a-words, because it is a compound word made of “vigasz” (consolation) and “ág” (branch). This didn’t feel right though, because even though this word ends with “szág”, we cannot say that this word has a “szág” suffix (“sz” and “ág” come from different words).

Fast forward to 2006 or so (I don’t remember the exact year): I’m a Vim user and downloading the Hungarian spell check file for Vim. It is actually two files: a text file and a binary file. That means I have a text file that is supposed to contain all Hungarian words! I remember the puzzle, and with a search, I quickly reveal that there is no third Hungarian word having the “szág” suffix. I also lookup “vigaszág”, but the spell file doesn’t have that word. The current version of the spell file contains 89128 words, but “vigaszág” is still not among them.

So there may be other obscure words ending with “szág”. But the point is that now I know that this is not a fair puzzle with a fair solution. There isn’t a word with a “szág” suffix after which you say “aha, of course”! If it has a solution besides “vigaszág”, it is probably similarly fishy.

This puzzle is not something that keeps people awake at night, but I think its story nicely illustrates the power of information technology even if it’s as simple as searching in a text file.

You can download language files for many languages from the Openoffice wiki.