Some completely unnecessary dictionary math

Here is a little dictionary experiment: give every letter a number, with A equal to 1 and Z equal to 26, and add up each word. I wanted to see which words landed on multiples of 26.

The page carries a big word list right in the HTML. JavaScript walks through it, skips entries containing a slash, and totals the character values. Then it repeatedly subtracts 26 and represents each chunk with a Z. Words whose total divides evenly by 26 get printed, so the output ends up looking like a long list of words followed by strings of Zs.

There is no grand mathematical discovery hiding in here. It is just one of those questions that is easy to ask and annoying to check by hand. A dictionary and a loop make a fairly good playground when I feel like finding patterns that may or may not mean anything.

See the dictionary experiment