Somatomedin

Melanosomes, uh?

While at a Magnetic Fields' concert a few years ago, one of the members of the band, as an example of just how rock'n'roll their lifestyle was, pointed out that the word exit is composed only of valid 2-letter scrabble words (ex, xi and it).

I've always been wondering if there were more words like this, mainly as a tool to help me remember the 105 two letter scrabble words. It's quite a simple task to do in Python, and the longest such words are denominator, kinetosomes, melanosomes and somatomedin. There's 1890 words in total (not including the two letter words themsleves) and a few more interesting words are sinusoidal, bonefishes, monoxides and tomatoes. The only two-letter word not to appear in any longer word is uh. Trying to find the shortest number of words needed to include all two-letter words is slightly harder, and the best I came up with was the following 30 words.

kinetosomes
dishonored
tamoxifen
myelitides
kabalas
shadower
pagoda
manumit
boyar
rehemmed
unai
lope
ofay
befit
nexus
ohm
ahi
joe
mut
zax
pinup
baaed
myoid
byelaw
habitat
si
qi
uh
wo
gi

To be honest, it's probably easier to remember the 105.

It's also interesting to try the same thing with three-letter words. There's a lot more of them (997, with a lot less overlap -- I could only reduce them to 742 longer words) , but there are some interesting composite words, such as outskated, operated and monorail.

There's also 509 words that act as both such as shadowed, honored and panamas.

The code for finding the words can be found on Github.