peripatetic: 7; ludic: 5; corollary: 8

wordscraping

Apr 30, 2025

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I’ve been maintaining a list of all the new words I encounter for the past five years.

The issue is that I don’t remember all the words perfectly, so I’m sure there are some duplicates. But the document is over 100 pages long.

I’d like to track/clean/count/remove duplicates. It was surprisingly easy to write a script for this!

When I first conceived of this script, I supposed I’d have to implement some convoluted logic—appending words to a list, cross-checking whether each new word is already on the list, and only appending it if that’s not the case.

But there’s actually a far simpler way! Sets don’t include duplicates, whereas lists do. So I was able to just create a set() and let that take care of collecting unique words.

27% of my words were duplicates. The most common:

These are the words I encountered most frequently and initially struggled to retain. Some of them seem funny now—they include words I use ~frequently (corollary, vignette, litany) and some of my favorite words (dichotomy, ludic, peripatetic)!

I always had the sense that Python was supposed to be an everyday/scripting language, but I’ve been underexploiting that modality. It’s pretty cool! I’m pleasantly surprised Google’s APIs are so easy to use, as well.

I hope to write more scripts and share them here.

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Originally published on Substack