Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Shorter than short

Each week Anu Garg compiles responses to his Word a Day mailing. Last week the words were short and someone responded with: "Ten small words with the greatest meaning -- 'If it is to be, it is up to me.'"

So the challenge is to use only words of 1 or 2 letters to form sentences! For your convenience, I listed a bunch of common words. Generally I avoided abbreviations, except a few that have become words like tv and ok, and chatspeak. But feel free to include any short words you want. It's your challenge :-)

If you want more words, OneLook lets you search by wild card which is how I compiled the list. And there are loads of Scrabble and crossword dictionaries online that would have lists like this.

(Would this be no challenge at all in Chinese where an English transcription like "ma" might have a dozen different meanings?)

a
I
(and all the letters are fair game too if they're used as names of themselves, like B for "b".)

Expressions:
ah
aw
ee
eh
er
ew
ga
ho
la
lo
oh
om
oo
ow
oy
uh
um
wa
yo
zz

mi (do re mi fa so la ti do)

ad
am
an
as
at
ax
be
do
el (elevated train in Chicago)
go
hi
id
if
in
is
it
ma
me
mu (elementary particle)
my
na
no
of
ok
on
or
ox
oz
pi
pa
so
ta (good-bye or thank you)
to
tv
up
us
we
ya

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