Dunc M.:
> Time to revive the search for common 5-letter words (OED) whose letters
> - either all or some - cannot be rearranged into other words of at least
> two letters.
If this is meant to be a mental puzzle, please ignore this response.
I don't have access to a list of words in the OED, and I doubt that
one is available online, but I do have access to the "Webster's 2nd"
word list, and I wrote a suitable Perl program and ran it on that list.
It claimed three hits: CIRRI, CIVIC, and QUICK.
(I know some dictionaries admit QI as a word these days, which would
disallow QUICK, but I say bah humbug to that. If Q occurs in a word
followed by a letter other than U, it's not English.)
As to the suggestions posted by other people, some due to
misunderstanding the question, my program disallowed them because
the words at right, or perhaps I should say the forms at right,
were words in the list:
QUEEN UN
QUEER QERE
QUELL ULE
QUERY QUEY
QUEST QUET
CRAZY CRY
LIVID LI
PENNY PEN
LYNCH LY
(I know, I wouldn't accept QERE as English myself, but there's RE, too.)
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "To err is human, but to error requires a computer."
m...@vex.net | -- Harry Lethall
My text in this article is in the public domain.