We have a theme of "Letter sequences where any vowel will work".

An analogous puzzle would be "Sound sequences where many vowel will work." Take a sequence of three consonent sounds and make as many words as you can by inserting vowels before, amid or after.

For example, LST would yield last, lest, list, lost, lust, lusty, least, lowset, licit, elicit, illicit, liest, Liszt

What other three-letter sequences are prolific?

BRD: brad, bread, bready, breed, bride, abroad, broad, brood, bard, bared, barred, beard, bird, birdy, bored, board, aboard, burried, berried, burred, abrade, byroad

A trailing 's' has an unfair advantage.

KRS: cares, caress, caries, carious, carissa, carouse, carries, carrizo, cars, carse, Caruso, coarse, coerce, coirs, cores, corozo, corries, Corse, coryza, course, cowries, crass, craws, craze, crazy, crease, Crees, creese, cress, crews, cries, crissa, cross, crosse, crows, croze, cruise, crus, cruse, cuirass, curacy, curassow, cures, curies, curios, curiosa, curioso, curious, curries, curs, curse, kaross, kauris, kersey, kouros, kris, kurus, acarus, Acorus, acraze, acres, across, eucrasy, Icarus, okras

edit: removed 'croci' -- since the second 'c' should be hard.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Virge,

Virge, wow! Presumably that wasn't done entirely on naked brain power? If it was, I hereby retire, hopelessly and abjectly outclassed.

acrues, accurse, chorus, cowers

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Virge, wow! Presumably that wasn't done entirely on naked brain power? If it was, I hereby retire, hopelessly and abjectly outclassed.

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In the same way that I consider Google to be an extension of my own memory, I consider a computer and the ability to program an extension of my lexical processing ability.

Details:
I took as my starting point a dictionary containing around 375,000 words (including archaic, obscure, medical, botanical terms and acronyms). Since I've recently been playing with the Metaphone algorithm (an algorithm to code English words phonetically by reducing them to 16 consonant sounds) I wrote a tiny program to take the Metaphone code of every word in the dictionary and build a frequency distribution.
I sorted the frequency distribution to find the most common consonant sound patterns.

Here are the top 20:
KT 240 words
KL 227 words
KR 195 words
TT 194 words
KRS 191 words
KRT 189 words
KLT 177 words
TR 175 words
ST 174 words
TK 164 words
KS 160 words
TN 158 words
KRN 156 words
KLS 155 words
TRS 154 words
KN 153 words
TL 152 words
TS 151 words
KK 147 words
FL 144 words

Since I wanted 3 consonant sounds, I took 'KRS' with 191 words and wrote another tiny program to list the 191 words. Then it was only a matter of rejecting the acronyms, any words I felt were too obscure, and any words where Metaphone had matched a hard 'G' sound or a 'Q' sound for the 'K' e.g. 'gross' and 'quires' also encode to 'KRS'.

To answer the question, no it wasn't based on naked brain power. Now where did I put my neurocannula jack?

BTW, the extra words you found that the algorithm didn't, and the words like 'croci' where the algorithm matched but shouldn't have, serve to point out the un-ruly nature of English. I think the only way to search for all the matches would be to search the pronunciation guides in a dictionary. At least with a good dictionary every word has been individually checked by a human, not just a rule-based algorithm.

Edit: Prompted by the words you found, I checked Metaphone matches to KKRS and XRS. ('X' is what it encodes for 'ch' and 'sh' sounds. It isn't smart enough to understand the two different pronunciations of 'ch'.)

accuracy, occurs, echoers, euchres, eucharis, ichorous, ichors, ochres, ochreous, ocherous

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Virge,

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Originally posted by Virge:
A trailing 's' has an unfair advantage.

KRS: cares, caress, caries, carious, carissa, carouse, carries, carrizo, cars, carse, Caruso, coarse, coerce, coirs, cores, corozo, corries, Corse, coryza, course, cowries, crass, craws, craze, crazy, crease, Crees, creese, cress, crews, cries, crissa, cross, crosse, crows, croze, cruise, crus, cruse, cuirass, curacy, curassow, cures, curies, curios, curiosa, curioso, curious, curries, curs, curse, kaross, kauris, kersey, kouros, kris, kurus, acarus, Acorus, acraze, acres, across, eucrasy, Icarus, okras

edit: removed 'croci' -- since the second 'c' should be hard.

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And isn't there also a small Caribbean island not far from Venezuela named Curaçao? [pronounced CURE-a-sow (-as-in-cow)] Also Icarus, and chorus, and choirs

Hard-core puzzlers call these "consonancies" or, if it's the sound rather than the particular letters, "phonetic consonancies."