Subwords Can Be Longer than the Rootword!!

Most of the time, subwords are shorter than the rootword, but every once in a while you get a subword that is indeed longer than the rootword.

Here's an example in Spanish:  The rootword is "IREMOS", a six-letter word, but one of its subwords, "ERRORES", is a seven-letter word!

 The reason for this is that a subword is defined as a word whose set of letters is a subset of the letters in the rootword.  Sets of letters only count each letter once.

Thus the set for "ERRORES" is {E,R,O,S}, while the set for "IREMOS" is {I,E,R,M,O,S}.  All the letters of the first set also occur in the second set, and so the former is a subset of the latter.  By definition, this means that "ERRORES" is a subword of "IREMOS".   The word "ERRORES" is long because it uses the letter R three times and the E twice, but doesn't use all the available letters like "IREMOS" does.

Here's another example of an 8-letter subwords of a 7-letter rootword.

The subword is "SENSORES" while the rootword is "NOMBRES".

As you can see, I am beginning to work with Spanish word lists, and I should have daily Spanish puzzles up and running soon!  Stay tuned!