Visie is a Simple Initialism Enumerator

It helps you name things with acronyms.

Installation

pip3 install visie

Wordlist

Visie builds acronyms from a plain text wordlist that holds one word per line. It reads the first wordlist it can open, in this order:

1. The path you pass with --dict, or -d.
2. The path in the VISIE_DICT environment variable.
3. /usr/share/dict/words, then /usr/share/dict/web2, then /usr/dict/words.

$ visie --dict /usr/share/dict/web2 pleasing orange home noise expeller
$ VISIE_DICT=/usr/share/dict/web2 visie pleasing orange home noise expeller

--dict and VISIE_DICT each name the one wordlist to use, so visie reports an error instead of falling back to another path when the wordlist you name is missing or unreadable. When visie finds no readable wordlist at all, it lists every path it tried and exits with status 1.

macOS ships /usr/share/dict/words. On Debian and Ubuntu, install a wordlist package such as wamerican. On Windows, and on container images that carry no wordlist, download a wordlist and set VISIE_DICT to its path.

Examples

By default, visie will find initialisms and acronyms that contain any subset of the provided words, in any order:

$ visie pleasing orange home noise expeller
HONE: home orange noise expeller
HOPE: home orange pleasing expeller
NOPE: noise orange pleasing expeller
OPEN: orange pleasing expeller noise
PEHO: pleasing expeller home orange
PEON: pleasing expeller orange noise
PHEON: pleasing home expeller orange noise
PHON: pleasing home orange noise
PHONE: pleasing home orange noise expeller
PONE: pleasing orange noise expeller

Wrapping words in angle brackets <...> means that they must all occur, in order:

$ visie 'pleasing orange home <noise expeller>'
HONE: home orange noise expeller
PHONE: pleasing home orange noise expeller
PONE: pleasing orange noise expeller

Words in square brackets [...] must all occur, but can be in any order:

$ visie '[pleasing orange home <noise expeller>]'
PHONE: pleasing home orange noise expeller

Parenthesis (...) means exactly one of the contained elements will be used:

$ visie --min-length 3 'pleasing home (orange noise expeller)'
HEP: home expeller pleasing
HOP: home orange pleasing
PHO: pleasing home orange
POH: pleasing orange home

Elements in curly braces {...} can occur in any order and any quantity:

$ visie 'pleasing home ({orange noise} expeller)'
PHON: pleasing home orange noise

Elements followed by a question mark are optional:

$ visie '<diaphone is? a? [pleasing orange home noise expeller]>'
DIAPHONE: diaphone is a pleasing home orange noise expeller

Finally, you can create recursive acronyms by using a period as a wildcard:

$ visie '<. is? a? [pleasing orange home noise expeller]>'
DIAPHONE: d is a pleasing home orange noise expeller
WANHOPE: w a noise home orange pleasing expeller

The name visie was discovered this way:

$ visie '<<. is? a?>? (efficient simple magical) recursive? (acronym initialism) (name word)? (generator enumerator)>'

Variant spellings

Pass --use-variants, or -u, to match respellings of each wordlist entry as well as the entry itself, such as c for k, or y for ee. Variants turn up acronyms that an exact match misses, and they make the search slower:

$ visie --use-variants pleasing orange home noise expeller
EPHO: expeller pleasing home orange
HEOP: home expeller orange pleasing
HONE: home orange noise expeller
HOPE: home orange pleasing expeller
NOPE: noise orange pleasing expeller
NEOP: noise expeller orange pleasing
NEPO: noise expeller pleasing orange
OPEN: orange pleasing expeller noise
PONE: pleasing orange noise expeller
PEON: pleasing expeller orange noise
PEHO: pleasing expeller home orange
PHEON: pleasing home expeller orange noise
PHON: pleasing home orange noise
PHONE: pleasing home orange noise expeller

Backronyms

Pass --backronym, or -b, to work the other way around. Give visie an acronym and it finds phrases whose word initials spell it:

$ visie --backronym HOPE --seed 8
HOPE: hyphenation omission preclassification expeditation
HOPE: hastatosagittate ontogenetically phantasmically elliptically
HOPE: hermitical outstart Petrarchistical eremitical
HOPE: holomorphosis odontoplerosis paradidymis epitasis
HOPE: Heliolitidae overemptiness powderiness expansiveness
HOPE: hematodystrophy overpay palaeoanthropography eutrophy
HOPE: Hegelianize ornithivorous pneumatophorous Eocarboniferous
HOPE: hexabromide opinionable preobtainable epibole
HOPE: humoristic Occamistic pseudelephant epulotic
HOPE: hyperemotivity omnitonality preaccessible effectivity

The space of expansions is far too large to search exhaustively: four letters over a wordlist of a quarter of a million words hold about 2.9e16 phrases. Visie therefore samples 100,000 of them at random and prints the best ranked of the sample. The quality of the results is bounded by the wordlist you point it at, so run the command a few times, and expect to discard most of what it prints.

Every run draws a new sample. Pass --seed with a whole number to repeat an earlier run. Pass --limit, or -n, to change how many phrases visie prints, and --min-word-length to raise the length of the shortest word it draws on:

$ visie -b HOPE --seed 8 --min-word-length 6 -n 3
HOPE: hydnocarpate overregulate preindicate ethmoturbinate
HOPE: horological occlusocervical primatical extemporal
HOPE: homoeochromatic orbitozygomatic phytomorphic enteradenographic

--min-length, or -m, sets the shortest acronym of the default search, so it has no meaning here: a backronym is as long as the acronym you pass. When no word in the wordlist begins with one of the letters, visie names that letter and exits with status 1:

$ visie -b HOPE --min-word-length 24
cannot expand 'H': the wordlist holds no word of 24 or more letters that begins with it

Ranking modes

Pass --rank to choose what the ranking prefers:

brevity stands in for common words. It is a crude stand in: a plain wordlist carries no frequency data, so visie cannot tell a familiar word from an obscure one.

$ visie -b VISIE --seed 1 --rank brevity -n 5
VISIE: vitta inane same ivin embalm
VISIE: volage incast Sunna Irfan Eryx
VISIE: verist inswamp Seljuk Iraq egma
VISIE: verist ibis surprise Iowan eyra
VISIE: vice Itea Serapeum Igara Esdras

rhyme scores the characters each pair of words shares at the end:

$ visie -b VISIE --seed 1 --rank rhyme -n 5
VISIE: vireo indecipherableness sluggingly innumerableness equableness
VISIE: verine intercortical sulcal iatrical epitaphical
VISIE: venezolano irremovable submissible insurmountable endamageable
VISIE: verger Ionicization subdelegation internalization edelweiss
VISIE: venally imperatorially senatorially improvability egotheism

rhythm prefers phrases whose words all hold the same number of syllables:

$ visie -b VISIE --seed 1 --rank rhythm -n 5
VISIE: Vanessa inwrapment suspected issuably expiator
VISIE: vapulation intervallic successlessly intranatal entosphenal
VISIE: versableness involucral subrebellion imitancy escharotic
VISIE: volitant interpledge subunit imposal ethnicon
VISIE: vividity inelastic superavit incumberment expropriator

harmony weighs rhyme most, then shared vowels, and takes off points for uneven syllable counts and for length:

$ visie -b VISIE --seed 1 --rank harmony -n 5
VISIE: vireo indecipherableness sluggingly innumerableness equableness
VISIE: venezolano irremovable submissible insurmountable endamageable
VISIE: versification intrication semiforbidding inosculation exocardiac
VISIE: verine intercortical sulcal iatrical epitaphical
VISIE: venally imperatorially senatorially improvability egotheism

Visie reads spelling as a stand in for sound, because a plain wordlist carries no pronunciation. Every one of these modes therefore approximates how a phrase sounds: they miss rhymes that spelling hides, such as through and blue, and report rhymes that do not sound alike, such as though and rough. The syllable count is an approximation for the same reason, and it undercounts words such as poem and idea, where two adjacent vowel letters belong to separate syllables.

Results that sound alike

Ranking for sound collapses the variety of the endings. Ranked by harmony for HOPE with seed 1, the top ten phrases hold 13 distinct three character word endings across their 40 words, even though all 40 of those words are different. Five of the ten turn on -ion, and the rest on -ous, -ic or -al, so the ten read as four results rather than ten.

Visie therefore prints at most one phrase per dominant word ending, the ending that the most of a phrase's words share. That raises the same run from 13 distinct endings to 23, and rhyme from 12 to 20. It leaves brevity untouched, because short words rarely end alike. Phrases held back fill any places left over, so you always get as many phrases as you asked for.

Pass --allow-similar to print the ranking as it stands:

$ visie -b HOPE --seed 8 --rank harmony -n 5 --allow-similar
HOPE: hyphenation omission preclassification expeditation
HOPE: hastatosagittate ontogenetically phantasmically elliptically
HOPE: homoiousian oxygenation progeneration exagitation
HOPE: hermitical outstart Petrarchistical eremitical
HOPE: hangee ovalization permeation epulation

Three of those five phrases end in -ion. The same run without --allow-similar replaces two of them:

$ visie -b HOPE --seed 8 --rank harmony -n 5
HOPE: hyphenation omission preclassification expeditation
HOPE: hastatosagittate ontogenetically phantasmically elliptically
HOPE: hermitical outstart Petrarchistical eremitical
HOPE: holomorphosis odontoplerosis paradidymis epitasis
HOPE: Heliolitidae overemptiness powderiness expansiveness

License

Visie is licensed and distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Contact us if you’re looking for an exception to the terms.