Plurals and Compounds

Some important notes on how Scribblenauts handles the words you enter:


 * Certain words have both singular AND plural forms kept separate, while others convert a plural into a singular. Example: Create the following four objects -- "Green Bean", "Green Beans", "Bean" and "Beans". Now use the "retype" option which brings up the last four objects you have entered. "Green Bean", "Green Beans" and "Bean" are listed, but "Beans" is not. The same happens for "Pretzels" and "Peas" - Scribblenauts will change the plural into a singular. For other words like "Snap Peas" and "Snow Peas", it will remember both the singular and the plural.


 * Certain compound words are converted into split words: Enter "Porkchop" and then look in the "retype" option -- the phrase "Pork Chop" has been recorded.


 * More complex phrases tend to trim off words until it finds a phrase it recognizes. Entering "Green Peas" may give you an object, but looking in the reloader shows you the game only recorded "pea". Enter "Pea Pod" and the reloader shows "pod", which indicates that even if it knew the first word alone, it didn't recognize them in a phrase. Enter "Tub" and you get a bathtub. Enter "Hot Tub" and you get a different object - a hot tub. Enter "Alien Hot Tub" and you get a regular Hot Tub, while the reloader only stores "hot tub". So Scribblenauts seems to trim off words one by one from left to right until it finds a phrase it recognizes. Enter "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" and you get a regular Turtle. Any number of adjectives will be cut off until the first recognized phrase of any size is found.

Porkchop -> Pork Chop Porkchops -> Pork Chop Pork Chops -> Pork Chops Green Porkchop -> Porkchop Green Porkchops -> Porkchops So it seems internally, it takes a phrase like "Green Porkchops", cuts off words until it finds something it recognizes (Porkchops), the records the phrase in the reloader. Then it converts "Porkchops" into "Porkchop" and then into "Pork Chop" (otherwise it would have converted "Porkchops" into "Pork Chops" which STAYS "Pork Chops")
 * There seem to be a number of steps in the word parsing process, and what is stored in the reloader isn't always consistent:

All of this basically comes down to two things:

1. A better understanding of the word parsing structure (only interesting to programmer types) 2. A way to determine how better to construct the wiki -- how should converted compounds and plurals be dealt with if the game sees some of them as the same word, or two different words (even if all the object properties are identical)