ZC Trigram Generator Version 1
The ZC Trigram Generator is a free program that generates new words based on a set of input words.
Download ZC Trigram Generator Version 1 (Windows XP/2000)
What is a trigram?
A trigram is a set of three letters, such as "the".
What does the trigram generator do?
The trigram generator takes some input text and uses it to generate new words based on the arrangement of letters in the original text.
What it does is look at pairs of letters and find out what letter usually shows up after that pair of letters. For instance, in the word "the", the trigram generator will see that "th" is followed by "e". It counts up all of the probabilities in the original text and uses them to generate random words. These words will be similar to those found in the original text, but "mashed up" because the generator is looking at pairs of words to select the next word rather than looking at entire words.
For example, if you were to take a list of the tropical storm names for 2006-2011 and use them to generate a new list of names, it would look like the screenshot above.
Another example would be taking a list of named stars and using it to generate new names. Since many of the names of stars in the Milky Way are based on Arabic names, the generated words would tend to be vaguely arabic-sounding.
Why would I want to do this?
There are a few reasons, but the most common reason would be to come up with a name for a character in a story, a product, a place, or any sort of proper noun. The advantage of using a trigram generator is that the words generated will tend to look similar to the input and will often be pronounceable.
There are other reasons you may want to use this. Perhaps you have a paragraph of text that you want to convert to vaguely incomprehensible gibberish that looks like it might be an alien language or a secret code. Maybe you just want to play around with mixing up random blocks of text to see what you get.
How do I use this program?
Paste or type some text into the box at the top, select the number of words to generate, and then click "generate" and it will create words in the bottom box.
The more text you use in the top box, the better the results will be in the bottom. If you use too little text (generally less than a full paragraph) generation may fail because the program doesn't have enough to go on. In that case, add a few more words and try again.
Can I get the lists of words that you used?
Sure. They're text files, and listed below.
List of tropical storm names 2006-2011
This program is freeware, but we welcome donations if you find it useful or just want to encourage us to create more free software.