I’m asking for trouble putting that word in the title but I thought it was a quirky internet thing.
Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com discovered something unique about viagra emails:
Because internet marketers love teaching others about medicine and the alphabet, the word “Viagra” is always spelled in hot, new, creative ways. For example, it might have a lower case “L” in the space where a capital “I” would go, or perhaps an “@” symbol where the letter “a” should be.
After I received 80,730 different emails trying to sell viagra, I started to wonder: How many different ways are there to spell Viagra?
I began my quest by simply collecting the Viagra spellings that showed up in my email. In 12 days, I had 79.
With two single letter substitution and addition characters used between letters, he found 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 variations of the word ‘viagra’ (that’s over 600 quintillion).
But upon further inspection, Rob found more and managed to get up to 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 variations (that’s over 1.3 sextillion). Put into context, if each variation was a grain of sand, that’d be enough to cover ever beaches in the world (approximately). Also, sextillion… viagra… it was destiny!
Then that got me thinking: I wonder how many variations there are of ‘COVID’ or ‘COVID-19’? If anyone can be bothered to work it out, let me know!
Word related: The man who submited a 52,438 word dissertation without any punctuation and passed and the etymological debate around daughters and milking cows