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Froic

Generate random meaningless words that comply to the English phonology and orthography.

$ froic
Trying 'serg'
Nah, it's too popular.
Trying 'chow'
Nah, it has meaning.
Trying 'froic'
'froic' looks good.

Usage

$ froic --help
usage: froic [-h] [--allow-meaningful-words] [--allow-popular-words]
             [--max-popularity INTEGER] [--max-syllables INTEGER] [--quiet]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --allow-meaningful-words
                        Don't use the dictionary to dismiss meaningful words.
  --allow-popular-words
                        Don't use Bing to dismiss popular words.
  --max-popularity INTEGER
                        Max allowed popularity. Default is 100000.
  --max-syllables INTEGER
                        Max number of syllables. Default is 1.
  --quiet               Only print the final result.

Origin

One day, I was reading Hadoop: The Definitive Guide. In the book, the author quotes Hadoop's creator, Doug Cutting, saying that:

[Hadoop is] the name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid’s term.

I was struck by this idea and set out to create a program to do just that: generating names that are short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless and not used anywhere.

The program generated its own name.

Legal

The program is released under the GNU Public License version 3. See LICENSE for more details.

The british-english file comes from the words package version 2.1-2 in Archlinux.