I don’t think my vocabulary is bad, but I love learning new English words. Especially weird ones! One book that is always on my desk is “More Weird and Wonderful Words” by McKeon. This is my goto book when I feel bored. More recently, I have switched to interacting with Claude and ChatGPT for learning new words and their usage.

In this article, I am sharing some of my recent interactions.

I started off by asking for the meaning of an uncommon word from the above book:

Nice!

Next question is about the longest word in English. Interestingly, the answer is not straightforward. Wikipedia gives some interesting perpectives on this. Anyway, this is what Claude told me:

You can see that this word is the 4th entry in Wikipedia table.

Let us see if Claude knows about “heterograms”. According to Wiktionary, a heterogram is a word or phrase in which no letter occurs more than once. 

Here is the interaction:

Next question is on “Chronograms”. According to Dictionary.com, a chronogram is “an inscription in which certain Roman numeral letters express a date or epoch on being added together by their values.” Quite interesting!

Here is the interaction with ChatGPT this time:

Note the Roman numerals that are in upper case in the given text.

Have you heard of “Word ladder”? In this word game, we are given two words, one being the starting word and the other the ending word. We begin with the starting word, and by just changing one letter at a time, we find a series of valid words that result in the ending word. I gave a simplified version of this to ChatGPT:

Well done! Somewhat disappointed (but not surprised) that the LLM was giving correct answers to all my questions, I thought hard and asked this question:

You can see from the first response that the system was struggling to get the answer. When I gave the correct answer, it was able to validate it. That made my day!

Playing games like this is a refreshing experience, if you know what I mean! Hope you too try something like this!

Have a great weekend!