Watsky words

2025-01-01

Between 2019 and 2023, rapper George Watsky released three albums titled Complaint, Placement, and Intention. When arranged next to each other, the titles form a 3x3 word puzzle that can be read across and down:

com pla int
pla cem ent
int ent ion

In an interview with Philip DeFranco, Watsky said the following:

when I worked with this linguist, we plugged the rules of this word puzzle into the english dictionary and it only spit out one possibility of 9-letter words that interlocked in the way we wanted it to...there was only one solution

Let's double check their work.

We start by assembling a list of nine-letter english words:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cullback/english-wordlist/refs/heads/main/words.csv \
    | rg '^[a-z]{9}$' \
    > words.csv
$ wc -l words.csv
    18841 words.csv

Checking all three-word combinations of that list would take a long time (18841³ = 6,688,239,997,321).

We can explore the search space more efficiently by using binary search to find the words with the prefix we want:

import fileinput
from bisect import bisect_left

def starts_with(words: list[str], prefix: str) -> list[str]:
  i = bisect_left(words, prefix)
  matches = filter(lambda w: w.startswith(prefix), words[i:])
  return list(matches)

words = sorted(w.rstrip() for w in fileinput.input())

for first in words:
  for third in starts_with(words, first[6:]):
    for second in starts_with(words, first[3:6]):
      if second.endswith(third[3:6]):
        print(f"{first},{second},{third}")

If we limit our search to only the top 1000 words, we reproduce their result:

$ head -n1000 words.csv | python watsky.py
    complaint,placement,intention

Running this gives us 1480 solutions:

$ cat words.csv | python watsky.py | wc -l
    1480

Some other titles Watsky could have chosen include:

worshiped
shittiest
pedestals

castrates
traumatic
testicles

prostates
statistic
testicles