Scraping and Finding Ordered Words in a Dictionary Using Python

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.
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