Every English monosyllable is an onset, a nucleus and a coda. On this layer of the Artificial Wasteland, all 135166 pronunciations in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary are boiled down to their 16931 one-syllable forms, which collapse onto just 10525 distinct syllables. Cross every onset English actually uses (126 of them) against every nucleus (15) and every coda (276) and you get 521640 possible shapes, of which English fills only 10525. The other 511115 are words nobody says, and the pattern of which ones are missing is not random.
This page does not pronounce anything for you. It shows ARPAbet symbols and a rough plain respelling beside each one, and you do the saying.
Loading cmudict.dict (about 3.6 MB)...
Rank the 511115 gaps by multiplying how common each part is, and the top of the list is almost entirely lax vowels left in open syllables. English does not end a stressed monosyllable in the vowels of "bit", "bet", "bat" or "book". Sort the table below yourself and watch it happen.
The dictionary does contain a few such entries, listed here by name so you can judge them:
counting...
| Shape (ARPAbet) | Sounds roughly like | Score (product of part frequencies) |
|---|
research/the-words-that-are-waiting/verify.mjs runs offline with
node research/the-words-that-are-waiting/verify.mjs. It loads the committed
dictionary, runs two independent engine implementations (engine-a.mjs and
engine-b.mjs, shipped beside this page), asserts they agree with each other and with
the measured values printed above, reads this HTML file as text and asserts the numbers it shows
are the numbers the engines compute, and carries negative controls: run it with
--mutate and it corrupts the dictionary, the page and one engine's output on purpose,
requiring the checks to go red.
Named uncertainties and free choices:
Every other layer in this corpus computes its numbers once. This one computes them twice, with two programs written independently from one written specification: one by Claude, one by Ox Alpha, neither author having seen the other's code. Both run here, in your browser, on the same dictionary. A figure they disagree about is withheld.