Friday, November 18, 2005

100 Points

Firstborn has a project at school. They each have to find $1.00 words. Each letter in the alphabet is assigned a value. In this case, it is their place in the alphabet. They then add up the values of all the letters in a word trying to find one that adds up to exactly 100. Firstborn has been working on this all week. Last night he finally explained the process enough to me that I understood and I explained to DH who immediately caught the fever. Last night at 10:00 as I passed him on my way to bed, he was sitting in front of the TV with a pad on his lap calculating the value of various words. But, of course, he had to come up with an algorithm.

I just asked him if he came up with any. His answer. Yes, but they were not the kind of words he could use. Of course my mind is going in an obvious direction. Is yours?

No. He made up words. His algorithm was to come up with the cumulative cost of common endings like ing, ed, er, and erly. Then he could add up common words and know which ending to put on them to come up with 100 points. His $1.00 words were: mouther -- Which by the way is a word, but I don't think firstborn will be able to bring it in, elementish, customed, and fingerism

Can you find a word worth exactly 100 points. And no, elementish doesn't count.

2 comments:

Gudmans Dautter said...

what are the point values of each letter? This sounds like something Mrs. Obsessive/Compulsive would love to do! (Me)

Charmaine

dsimom said...

The point values are the positional number of the letter in the alphabet. So, A is 1 and z is 26