Scraping and Finding Ordered Words in a Dictionary Using Python (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 23 Feb, 2026

An ordered word is a word in which the letters appear in alphabetical order. For **Example:

abbey -> ordered

geeks -> not ordered

Installation

Install the requests module, using the following pip command:

pip install requests

Approach

The task is divided into two main parts:

1. Scraping the Dictionary

Fetch the content from the URL using the requests library.
Decode the UTF-8 content into a string.
Split the string into a list of words.

2. Finding Ordered Words

Traverse the list of words.
Compare ASCII values of adjacent characters in each word.
If all characters are in alphabetical order, the word is ordered.
Otherwise, skip it.

Implementation

**Note: This article uses the public dictionary text file (unixdict.txt) available at https://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/unixdict.txt for scraping.

Python `

import requests

url = "https://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/unixdict.txt" fd = requests.get(url) c1 = fd.content.decode("utf-8").split()[16:]

for word in c1: if len(word) < 3: continue

if all(ord(word[i]) <= ord(word[i+1]) for i in range(len(word)-1)):
    print(f"{word}: Word is ordered")

**Output

not: Word is ordered
Jan: Word is ordered
not: Word is ordered
!==: Word is ordered
!==: Word is ordered
...: Word is ordered
...: Word is ordered
!==: Word is ordered
for: Word is ordered
for: Word is ordered
===: Word is ordered
!==: Word is ordered
!==: Word is ordered
........

**Explanation:

**fd = requests.get(url): Download word list from URL.
**c1 = fd.content.decode("utf-8").split()[16:] Decode, split into words, skip first 16 entries.
**if all(ord(word[i]) <= ord(word[i+1]) for i in range(len(word)-1)): Check if letters are in alphabetical order.