T9

The T9 input system was developed to make typing faster when cell phones only had a number pad, requiring multiple taps on the same key to reach the desired letter, by having a dictionary of the most used words in the English dictionary and guessing which word the user meant by just a single tap on the key where the letters of the word were.

This script performs that same search using the dictionary words.csv.

Usage

Call search with the words encoded in numbers (a -> 2, b -> 2...) and get the corresponding words ranked from most frequent to less frequent in the provided dictionary.

Searching for word, test, and mirror:

$ python search.py 9673 8378 647767
('9673', ['WORD', 'WORE', 'YORE', 'ZNSE'])
('8378', ['TEST', 'VEST', 'VERT', 'VERV'])
('647767', ['MIRROR'])

Also, for matters of testing, you can provide a word in regular text with the parameter reverse and the script will convert the word to numbers and perform the search. This is interesting to check which ambiguous words a search term might have.

$ python search.py word test mirror --reverse
('word', '9673', ['WORD', 'WORE', 'YORE', 'ZNSE'])
('test', '8378', ['TEST', 'VEST', 'VERT', 'VERV'])
('mirror', '647767', ['MIRROR'])

Note that the script prints back the searched word, the number encoded word, and the search results.