I’ve just finished a new manuscript called Uplands. It’s a sequel to a story I wrote about a year ago called Bottomlands. They’re dark fantasy short stories about a witch and her familiar.

I was thinking I might want to write more stories in the series and was grasping for more words that end with -lands. I pretty quickly thought of grasslands and barrowlands, but then I was kind of stumped. I went to do a websearch, but how do you search for -lands?

This is a job for regular expressions, I thought.

I poked around for a few minutes to see if I already didn’t have a dictionary file on my computer, but pretty quickly I decided to just download this list of 479k English words for this purpose. The Internet is still useful for a few things.

Then I crafted my regular expression using the unix utility egrep. I went through a couple of iterations to get it just right, but ended up with this:

egrep '^[a-z].+lands$'  ~/Downloads/words.txt

It looks through the file for words that end in “lands” and that aren’t capitalized (so you don’t get Netherlands, for example).

I ended up with 53 words. I think that’s more stories than I’ll want to write in this series. Some of the words are pretty good too! (e.g. badlands, borderlands, hinterlands all seem good for dark fantasy). Some don’t seem so useful (e.g. islands, lallands, playlands).

Interestingly, barrowlands wasn’t among the words. Go figure.