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Ideal test toponyms

Started by Scott5114, Today at 03:14:47 AM

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Scott5114

Leudimin mentioned on the wiki Discord that he has a set of standard test names that he uses for doing road-related fictional things with. Since I do a lot of type design for my job, that got me started thinking on what characteristics a battery of "standard" test names should have. For type design and lettering purposes, you would probably want to have a lot of common letter combinations (bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams). If you can make a word with a lot of these look good, you will be able to make most words look good, because the same letter combinations would appear often in many different words.

What are the most common letter combinations? Someone at Notre Dame ran an analysis on English-language works on Project Gutenberg, and came up with the following lists:
  • Bigrams: th, he, in, er, an, re, nd, on, en, at, ou, ed, ha, to, or, it, is, hi, es, ng
  • Trigrams: the, and, ing, her, hat, his, tha, ere, for, ent, ion, ter, was, you, ith, ver, all, wit, thi, tio
  • Quadrigrams: that, ther, with, tion, here, ould, ight, have, hich, whic, this, thin, they, atio, ever, from, ough, were, hing, ment

So, using the above lists...
1. What toponym, letter for letter, is the most efficient representation of as many of the above letter combinations as possible? I imagine the easiest way to express this would be to count the number of common letter combinations and divide it by the number of letters. I ran a quick analysis on the list of Nevada municipalities (easy since there's only 19 of them) and came up with the most efficient municipality in Nevada being Henderson (he, nd, de, er, on, nde are all on the list, making 6 matches, divided by 9 letters, producing a score of 0.66).
2. What is the most efficient toponym in each state?
3. What set of toponyms would most efficiently cover the entire list above?
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef


CNGL-Leudimin

#1
Not only I use the set for road-related fictional things, but also for many other things, for example I have them set as additional places on the weather app :sombrero:. However a recent event has seen me replacing one of them with the result they are now all geographically in Europe, although I'm not sure if the new entry will stick around.
Supporter of the construction of several running gags, including I-366 with a speed limit of 85 mph (137 km/h) and the Hypotenuse.

Please note that I may mention "invalid" FM channels, i.e. ending in an even number or down to 87.5. These are valid in Europe.



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