DIY

If you want to make your own, go right ahead. It’ll find you a matching word for whatever you put in.

Tick this if you want to be able to write in both boxes without it generating you the other word.

A can of beer that says Craft Lager in the style of the east van sign

Looks like everyone’s on the band wagon

We were having ramen for lunch1, and I saw a can of beer doing the East Van sign thing. I started wondering how many other things you could do that way.

It turns out that you can actually make a LOT of these things. I downloaded a word list and did a bit of magic processing. If you aren’t interested in the how, and just want to look at the funny combinations of words then skip over all the words to follow and just look at the pictures! They are generated live, so just keep hitting refresh for a new set.

One thing that has struck me is just how many of these words seem to have a relationship. Making patterns is so baked into the brain!

I downloaded a list of English words that has over 350k words in it. It really shows because I have no idea what about half of these words mean. It'd be interesting to see what comes up if I used Basic English. Edit: I actually did add the Basic English list; the crosses it pumps out are amazing! I then processed these words into two sets of bins; one for the horizontal words and one for the vertical words.

Horizontal words need to have an odd number of letters and be more than three letters long. Vertical words just need to be more than 4 letters long. They are then ‘binned’ or grouped by the letter at the crossing. That’s the middle letter for horizontal words and the second letter for vertical ones.

Basic English

Hard English

Here’s some from the full list of english words:

The repo for all of this is here. Thanks to dwyl for the english-words.

The East Van Sign at night

From “…that’s gangster and now the whole world will see…”

  1. That’s my sketches on a chopstick wrapper. I was also faffing about with the ESPN penis thing too. ↩