Thursday, October 18, 2007

Demo

What does "demo" mean? A few years ago, it meant, "demo" of a prototype, feature, or a product, i.e., a demonstration. The I renovated my apartment and when the contractor said, we "demo" the place, I learned that it meant "demolish". Now I hear at work how a strategy may "demo" ads, and I realize that means "demote". How can one to quickly find out how many words in the dictionary begin with prefix "demo" and what is the prefix that comes after the prefix "demo"?

1 Comments:

Blogger rrenaud said...

Unix works well here.

How many words in the english dictionary start with demo?

rob:/usr/share/dict$ grep ^demo american-english | wc -l
75

What is the last one?

rob:/usr/share/dict$ grep ^demo american-english | tail -n 1
demount

What is the first word after the last word that starts with demo?

rob:/usr/share/dict$ grep -A 1 ^demount american-english
demount
demur

I don't know if you consider demu an English prefix, however.

My typing and thinking dominated by far the actual running time of the greps and pipes.

10:48 PM  

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