beaut, baba, beeves
In order to get 'beaut', we had to swallow 'baba' and 'beeves' (Yes, alas! It is the plural of beef!). Words in nine or more (of 16) dictionaries. [1]
In exactly two dictionaries
In only one:
This is actually the word abbé, written (from the FRELI word list [2]) using HTML entities [3]. Different word lists have different ways of encoding letters that are not part of standard ASCII.
The only languages that can comfortably be written with the repertoire of US-ASCII happen to be Latin, Swahili, Hawaiian and American English without most typographic frills. It is rumoured that there are more languages in the world. [4]
For a particular English dictionary [4], it was found that the individual letters {a..z} each appear as separate entries. Webster's dictionaries have followed this practice (of listing individual letters, as well as letters from foreign alphabets, like alpha and beta) for quite some time. [5]. I thought it made sense to see how often each of these stand-alone letters appeared in other words.
$ for i in `grep ^.$ $w`; do echo $i `grep -c $i $w`; done|sort -nrk2|head -26
| e 253599 a 246831 i 214267 r 203284 n 195631 o 189798 s 188871 t 170121 l 156410 | u 113642 c 107493 h 101831 d 101512 m 96576 g 82380 p 71336 b 65707 k 61467 | y 60780 f 47018 v 41102 w 36484 z 22110 j 20261 x 8156 q 5844 |
However, one might ask: "Why stop with 26?" Indeed:
$ for i in `grep ^.$ $w`; do echo $i `grep -c $i $w`; done|sort -nrk2|head -27|tail -1
é 3898
Continuing on, just a bit:
$ for i in `grep ^.$ $w`; do echo $i `grep -c $i $w`; done|sort -nrk2|head -35|tail -8
í 2321
á 1525
ï 1137
ó 1047
ä 939
è 879
ö 766
ñ 724
One needs an ñ from time to time in English. Imagine American cooking without the jalapeño, or the habeñero. Or birthdays without piñatas. [6]
Imagine English romance without (words and frequencies)
$ grep é $e|head
fiancée 1121
café 1113
fiancé 1037