Mar 27, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Ah, the joys of winter break. Sleeping in. Visiting family and friends. Sifting through all 173,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary to find an obscure 11-letter word.

Why would anyone want to work so hard in their free time to find such a word for a radio contest? Thomas Barr ‘08 will tell you it was for the challenge.

During Christmas week on the popular National Public Radio show Car Talk, the weekly puzzler required listeners to find the longest English word that remains a valid English word as you remove its letters one at a time, but without rearranging any of the letters. For example: sprite, spit, pit, it, I. There are many such words, but, as Barr discovered, only one with 11 letters.

Barr, an engineering major and self-taught computer programmer, pondered the question while sitting in his Dallas, Texas, living room with his father, a computer programmer. They tossed some ideas around, then Barr went to work writing a script that would enable an exhaustive computational search of the entire Scrabble dictionary, which contains the prototypical list of English words.

“My particular solution was relatively naive,” says Barr, who teaches a computer class on the Python programming language one evening per week to classmates. “I just did a brute force search, but there were a handful of tricks I used to make it go faster.” The program ran in about 40 seconds on a relatively slow computer. The longest word it found was “complecting,” which means “joining by weaving." Removing one letter at a time, complecting breaks down to completing, competing, compting, coping, oping, ping, pig, pi, I—all valid English words.

“I looked at this and thought, ‘nobody’s going to get this,’” says Barr.

He was right. Barr was identified as the winner and received a $26 gift certificate to spend at cartalk.com. But the real prize, he says, was having his name and the college’s name mentioned on national radio. CarTalk is heard by more than two million people and is one of highest-rated programs on public radio in the United States.

Barr says when he returned to campus in January, he was congratulated by his classmates as well as faculty and 

“It was good fun,” Barr says.

Story by Stephanie Graham