Query: Possible App: ACRONYM MAKER?

Café
#1

How difficult would it be to make a TW that you can …

1 – Enter desired Acronym … e.g. “SPAM”

2 – Give a “pick-list” of words letter-by-letter. e.g. for “S” the options of “specious, speculative, serendipitous, silencio etc …”

3 – Repeat for each letter…

4 – Save to a new Acronym Tiddler … e.g. …

Title: SPAM
Tag: Acronym
Text: …

Specious
Plenitudinous
Abberant
Mail

Any tips on a procedure to do that?

TT

#2

An important reference on quantifying the quality of acronyms: SearCh for humourIstic and Extravagant acroNyms and Thoroughly Inappropriate names For Important Clinical trials (SCIENTIFIC): qualitative and quantitative systematic study | The BMJ

My favorite part are the criteria for acronym rating:

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#3

It doesn’t sound particularly difficult. But making ones that end up sounding good might be more of a challenge. First up, you’d need a randomizer. There are probably many of them around. I have one that gives a repeatable sequence, based on a seed value, starting by default with a timestamp, but re-seedable as necessary, and I’m sure there are many other similar implementations. Mine is in my Bullshit Bingo wiki.

You’ll need a list of words to use. You can maintain a single tiddler with a list of words and parse out start letters as you go, or, my preference, keep one tiddler per letter. If you’re looking for random words, I’ve been happy with some of the other tools at Random Adjective Generator — Generate 1000+ Random Adjectives.

You might want to get a little more sophisticated and maintain separate lists of adjectives and nouns, as the last word should probably be a noun. But that’s an implementation detail.

Sorry, the above was based on a too-quick reading of the problem. (Of course, I like that problem more than the original! :slight_smile: )

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#4

Not very hard:

https://demos.tiddlyhost.com/#Acronym%20maker

[[Words]]

<$edit field="Acronym"/>

<ul>
<$list filter="[{!!Acronym}split[]]" variable="letter" counter="n">
<li>Pick a word for the letter <<n>> (<<letter>>): 

<$select field={{{ =[<letter>]=[<n>]+[join[]] }}}>
<$list filter='[[Words]get[text]enlist-input[]search:title:anchored<letter>]'>
<option value=<<currentTiddler>>><$view field='title'/></option>
</$list>
</$select>
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#5

Ha! @telumire

Thanks for the “quick start”! Very much.
Later I may need more help (I’m not a programmer :upside_down_face:)

TT

#6

Ha! Your Bullshit Bingo is fun!

Right. In terms of my aim it is precisely the exploration of “language flow”.
Believe it or not, it is going to be used to help non-native English speakers better master/hone vocabulary and concept usage.

Tx, TT

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#7

Ah, then you might want to consider adding adverbs in there. The last word is always a noun. If the acronym is more than two letters, the first word could be an adverb. Any in between are adjectives. Agressively Bold Chickadees.

Of course this will not allow for the many places where nouns fit into adjective spaces: Absolutely Bonkers Child Destinies. Child is playing the role of an adjective here. I’m sure grammarians have a term for that. But it should still allow for a huge number of reasonable acronyms, plus many funny ones.

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#8

Right. Actually doing this Whole Acronym Thing (WAT?) is part an experiment to see if my students can work out the logic of making acronyms without further massive instruction in formal “grammarian”. So, I’ll likely, at first, mix up the various types of word in one list (per letter) and see whether a further crutch is needed—or not.

To be fun, flexy, and doable.

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#9

That was great!

For my final idea. Rather than a DROP DOWN (singular selector) I think that a full “LIST” or, better, a “SELECTION CLOUD” might be better??

I am NOT expecting you help me get there!

But I do think the use case is maybe interesting enough to pique (excite) interest in a larger selection canvas than a drop down?

TT

#10

The Original Post demands a word list, or dictionary. However a “poor mans dictionary” could be built from words found in your wiki, if it has many in its own right.

  • You may scan all tiddlers and split by words and deduplicate them, and save them in a data tiddlers.
  • Your acronym maker can then offer all the words that begin with the letter you are looking for.
  • I presume you are trying to retrospectively choose the words to make up your acronym, there is a name for that :thinking:
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#11

A full list might be a bit too much, I used a list of 1000 common english words that can be found here: mit.edu/~ecprice/wordlist.10000

It might be manageable if someone find a way to automatically hide words that would not make sense with the previous words that were picked, or that would not match the meaning of the accronym - but I’m guessing that it would involve creating metadata for each words to be able to attribute meaning, and right now this is something that is too complicated for me :sweat_smile:

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#12

Another approach I have not tested is ask an LLM like chat gpt to come up with the words.

I remember the name of such things;

Backronyms

#13

Right. That is useful to see. Tx!

#14

I wanted to thank you all for your very helpful, practical, comments.

Just FYI. I have decided to create “dictionary entries” from My Own Brain (MOB) rather than use long 3rd party lists.

The proposed procedure …

1 - in a form enter the initials of an acronym … click …
2 - … creates a second entry form with slots for each letter …
3 - Use MOB to fill-in the acronym component words …
4 - When done … click … to …
- save the Acronym details to a Tiddler
- save the acronym component words to data tiddlers: one data tiddler per initial letter (a-z)

IF I manage to get that far I’ll come back for a bit of help on how to use those created “AZ lookup” Tiddlers further.

Thanks again.
TT

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