Inspiration

While building Ordle and Stavehumle, I found myself looking at hundreds of thousands of words, and wondering what sorts of patterns they had.

Process

I pulled the entire dictionary into a single trie. However, data structures aren’t inherently visual. I wanted to have some fun visualization of this giant data structure.

I also wanted to try out Preact 1. I’d heard good things about the performance, and thought this might be a good opportunity.

Screenshot of Ordkart

Building the app

I used the Preact template generator to bootstrap the app and got to work. For the initial version, I focused purely on having a UI to navigate the trie .. and I found it surprisingly cool. I found it neat to watch the “lights” fade as you spelled out a word (pruning branches along the way) until all of the sudden, you’d add another letter and get a bunch more options!

So with that initial version, I bought ordkart.no, published the app with GitHub Pages, and sent the link to some friends.

It hasn’t really been touched since, but I’ll revisit it eventually. 2

  1. I usually use React since that’s what we use at work. ↩︎

  2. My backlog of project ideas & improvements grows faster than my available time. ↩︎