Abstract: Methods for scoring a word or generating new words according to a characteristic of interest can use a computer system to access a corpus of words exemplifying a characteristic of interest. Each word is broken into a type of subword segments. Each subword segment in the corpus of words has a value score. The word to be scored is broken into the type of sub-word segment and value score for each is determined and is used to create a characteristic of interest score for the word. For generating new words, a number of first subword segments are chosen based at least in part upon value scores. At least one additional subword segment is combined with the first subword segments to create a set of potential new words, a second value score is generated for each, and a new word is selected and provided to a user.