On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:20 AM Hilarie Orman <ho@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
You could some of them easily by grouping all words with a common tail, such as: (b, c, k, m, n, r, s, sm, tr, qu)ite and then look for words with a common prefix pair (b, c, f, h, l, m, qu, r, s, t, w, br, fl, ...)ake to find unremarkable Spoonerisms like: "That a cake bite" vs. "That's a bake cite".
That will find spoonerism candidates, but will have both false positives and false negatives, because spoonerisms are defined by pronunciation, not spelling. The example you gave is a good one: "cake bite" => "bake cite" is not a spoonerism, but "cake bite" => "bake kite" is. Is there an dictionary, either online or otherwise publicly available, tat has the map from spelling to pronunciation (for example in IPA) in machine-readable form? That would be really useful for things like this. Andy