This is a visualisation of all 1015 English three-letter-words, structured according to their usage in the English language.
I set out to map all the words according to their ‘alikeness’. Words as cat, hat, and bat should be placed on equal distance from each other as they have two letters on two positions in common. I devised a system that would score each word on these properties:
Flash ‘attraction’ toolBut ran into problems when I wanted to place them in respect to each other. I ran the “attraction”-calculator for each word to each other word and used the sum of these values as their “popularity-index”; which describes the uniqueness of the word. A word that has little words that look like it scores low.
Next I calculated the usage of the words as used in the english language, and the usage of the letters they’re built off (their ‘scrabble’-value), and plotted this in a new graph, inspired by star trail photography.
Position near the center marks a non-unique word, speed is determined by the use in the english language, and color is calculated from their ‘scrabble’-value; a red word has a common letter on the first position and two rare on the second and third. A overall light word is composed of common letters.
Popularity HD from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.
And lastly, one was able to explore this universe of words by typing the words in, hence creating dynamic constellations that deform by the speed of the words:
