Not until next week of course, it's palm sunday now but we'll just go with the popish calendar. I'm no librarian and only a bit of a polyglot (4), but I never thought Pascha and the root of "pathos" related. I'd have been surprised if it turned out they were. Interesting stuff. I had my own crazy easter etymology conjecture - I wondered if the Hungarian family name 'Esterhazy' (as in, say, the dood in the Dreyfus affair) had anything to do with German 'Osterhase' (easter bunny). Yes, I know it's absurd - and that's exactly what a Hungarian philology prof. told me. It's somewhat similar to the Pascha thing because a) it involves easter b) it seeks common etymology between an indo-european and a non-indoeuropean language.

The hacked cyrillics made me think of this - if one wrote in all caps and all one had was a latin character set, what's the longest word in a cyrillic-using language one can write? That is, you can only use cyrillic letters that are visually identical to roman ones (e.g. X, P or A but not R or L).

Compressing dictionaries kjk, the reviewers are right. That dictionary is great and it's far too fat. Note that even pkzip is capable of making the db smaller. I've mentioned this well known book before - check out John Bentley's Programming Pearls. Aside from all the other great stuff it describes the program spell which crammed a 75000 entry dictionary into less than 64k. You have definitions as well as just words so your problem is somewhat different but the column should give you a bunch of interesting ideas.