I saw a rat crawling around a drain as I biked into Harvard this morning. I don’t see many rats, but English has reserved a three-letter word for them. This got me thinking about the set of possible consonant-vowel-consonent triples. How many are words?

Well, somebody could run a program and find out exactly. Meanwhile I enjoy spotting a few cases where all five triples are in play:

bag, beg, big, bog, bug
bat, bet, bit, bot, but
pat, pet, pit, pot, put
pap, pep, pip, pop, pup

Sometimes none of the five are in ordinary use:

fam, fem, fim, fom, fum
lan, len, lin, lon, lun

And there are some nice gaps, ready to be made into words, like internet domain names that nobody has yet picked up:

Rab, rem, rit, rom, rup.
Sab, sep, sig, som, sut.

[24 November 2023]