Here's a dictionary with a twist – all the words in it are composed of concatenations of the chemical symbols of the periodic table! So this is a small subset of the Oxford English Dictionary, or any other abridged or unabridged dictionary of English. With the periodic table as our alphabet, these pages will list all the words I (Astoria Bob) can come up with, and you can submit words to the dictionary any time! Names and place names are OK.
I've already thought of using this dictionary as a Scrabble dictionary, and devising a Scrabble variant that uses the atomic symbols of the periodic table as the alphabet, with points awarded by adding up the atomic numbers in each word. The board would probably be open, or without any extra point boxes, as the points are really more arbitrary, and the idea would be learning. Longer words could give higher point totals, but not necessarily. For instance, a U would get you 92 points, so any word with a U is a good one.
Besides Scrabble, the idea for using this dictionary is to do constrained writing. It will be interesting to see what people can write without such words as "a", "it", "and", "the" and so on. In addition, this dictionary will not contain words with a J, Q or Z, since these letters are not in any atomic symbols in the periodic table. Words with X will be limited to those with XE, such as foxes or boxes. For whatever reason, I find this exercise of coming up with elemental words (Elementish?) really cool!
A
Ac
accurate
Ag
agar
Al
Al
Alps
Alpo
Am
amber
America
ammo
amp
amplifier
Amy
Ar
argan
artistic
As
as
ass
At
at
Au
B
B
bonbon
buy
Be
beam
bear
beat
Bi
words to place
race
spice
sauce
sassy
was
where
when
why
how
what
if
feral
click
tick
knock
that
path
one
threat
noise
voice
nose
scab
facial
false
lick
lice
case
base
suffice
crack
cram
coy
scam
Osiris
sip
site
cite
kite
paste
cay
ray
say
bay
clay
lay
fray
fry
huge
gauge
rage
kind
find
bind
rack
Ricky
sticky
finicky
chalk
vice
nice
wise
note
vote
coat
attack
calculate
cab
back
sack
snack
stack
stick
stink
skunk
lace
liberal
notice
irate
champion
bocci
moth
month
batch
both
beach
critical
critic
snow
snowy
far
near
certain
hypocritical
critical
one
nine
ten
is
inner
I
he
she
you
her
ask
cask
task
bask
vat