Fri, 17 Jan 2003  

Thanks to all Book List participants who contributed 
141,346 pages read in 2001. Congratulations to Jeff Gadd 
who held on to first place right up to the end, with 
27,049 pages.
http://www25.brinkster.com/wasoxygen/books.asp?Year=2002

Alicia Bennett was the top filmviewer of the year, with
23 titles entered.
http://www25.brinkster.com/wasoxygen/movies.asp?Year=2002

Grid participants may by now have gotten out of the habit
of watching for words with odd letter combinations (no,
'filmviewer' is not in dictionary.com). Players worked
together to find a word for every possible combination
of two letters, then competed to fill their own grids.
2113 words were entered, most of them during a frenetic
rush in July. Ray Hunley was the runaway champ, with 561 
words out of 676 possible letter pairings, from 'baa' to 
'frazzles.' And that was *after* he deleted his 26 most
egregiously obscure words (bangkok, boshvark, cotquean, 
czarevna, dogvane, ecbasis, ecgonine, falx, fjeld, gravlax, 
hexdecylic, jharal, kafkaesque, lacwork, muzjik, nudzh, 
oxyquinoline, procatarxis, scherzo, secpar, siliqyiform, 
socman, sovkhoz, suqs, umquhile, vivda).

For the sake of completeness, I downloaded a giant list
of English words (about seven million entries, including
various forms of each word) and searched it for letter
pairs. The results are visible in red here:
http://www25.brinkster.com/wasoxygen/grid1detail.asp

I used the first word that came up in the list that 
was in dictionary.com and hadn't been used elsewhere.
Some of the results were interesting: 

ablepharia  n. a congenital absence of eyelids 
acarology  n. the study of mites and ticks
aliquant  n. an integer that is not an exact divisor 
  of some quantity
amphiscii  n. pl. the inhabitants of the tropic, whose 
  shadows in one part of the year are cast to the north, 
  and in the other to the south 
ankus  n. an elephant goad with a sharp spike and hook 
apojove  n. apoapsis in orbit around Jupiter 
bizcacha  n. a large burrowing South American rodent 
  allied to the chinchillas, but much larger

Have a great 2003!