Scott BaroloNov 21, 2022

Re-posting from my new home server:

I’m making a tournament bracket of the BEST WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Winner to be determined by head-to-head Mastodon polls in December.

Nominate your favorites by replying to this post 💙

#WordBracket tournament details coming soon

#words #linguistics #bookstodon #AmReading #AmWriting

Show threadScott BaroloNov 25, 2022

Update to the #WordBracket: Here are the words that people have suggested so far. URL is in the alt text.

I might wait until @levparikian finishes his larger random-word Twitter tournament before starting this one on Mastodon.

Note: I did a Twitter #WordBracket in March 2020, so please don't accuse me of plagiarism. Lev is very cool & neither of us was the first to do this. My tournament will be shorter (128 words) & include a bracket competition to raise money for charities of your choice.

Show threadJustin LindNov 25, 2022

@sbarolo

What a wonderful collection of words!

🍾💥📝❤️💯🍾

I can’t wait to dive in with everyone!

Show threadJustin LindNov 25, 2022

@sbarolo
I have no idea how people tend to arrange brackets, let alone how you in particular plan to arrange THIS bracket…but can I put in a vote for some kind of attention to word length? 📊

Perhaps based on the number of syllables for each word??? 🤷🏽‍♀️

It would be cool for example if early on short words competed against short words + long-to-long…but when it gets further along, all of the different lengths have to start competing head to head

Show threadScott BaroloNov 25, 2022
@Justin_Lind interesting idea! I did a crayon bracket where they were “seeded” by likelihood to win, another one where they were grouped by color, and the results were very different (although the same crayon won both times.) Grouping words by length would prevent long words from sweeping the later rounds , but would also knock out favorite words earlier. 🤔
Show threadJustin Lind

@sbarolo
Yeah...it seems like if you don't do some kind of shaping by word length, early on the shorter and more common words might get knocked by superficially rarer words. But perhaps that's me.

What if each large group initially (of 16/32/64 words) had a similar spread of words across lengths/syllables?

So that at each general stage of the bracket (64 words left, 32 words left) there was possibility or even a tendency to still maintain a spread of word lengths, if that makes sense

Nov 25, 2022 at 5:20pmWeb
Show threadJustin LindNov 25, 2022
@sbarolo
Oh also the link as it appears in the ALT text doesn't appear to work.
Perhaps you need to go to the sheets settings and adjust the share-settings and include a slightly different link for others?
Show threadScott BaroloNov 25, 2022
@Justin_Lind having done a lot of these, I think that will have the opposite effect. The most popular class of words will win each division. The only way to protect a class of competitors in a tournament is to give them their own division IME - which has pros and cons
Show threadScott BaroloNov 25, 2022
@Justin_Lind if you’re on twitter you can see what happened in the two #crayonbracket s with the same crayons arranged differently
Show threadJustin LindNov 25, 2022

@sbarolo Fascinating, good to know! I really have no ideas how these things tend to play out, I was just hoping that word-length-balancing was being considered and if possible, that the initial seeding of the brackets did what it could to mitigate situations where one end of a spectrum gets swamped early on (whether that's common words, or obscure words, or long words, or short words, etc.)

Glad you are already thinking of these questions! :)