Searching for Autograms

Searching for Autograms This sentence contains three a’s, three c’s, two d’s, twenty-seven e’s, four f’s, one g, five h’s, eleven i’s, two l’s, sixteen n’s, seven o’s, five r’s, twenty-nine s’s, sixteen t’s, two u’s, six v’s, six w’s, six x’s, and three y’s. What’s an autogram An autogram is a self-referential sentence that writes out a count of its own characters - like the sentence above. You can count the number of occurrences of each letter in that first quoted sentence and verify it’s the same as claimed, or just trust that the sentence really does have three a’s, three c’s, two d’s, etc. As you can imagine, constructing an autogram is challenging. The act of simply writing out how many of a particular letter is in a sentence changes the very letters that the sentence must describe. Consider how Lee Sallows, the inventor of autograms, describes searching for one by hand: Suppose, for instance, a few day’s painstaking labour have at last yielded a near-perfect specimen: only t ... Read full article.