Resource Library

Below you can find all of the different resources in the Guide: practice problems, former Google interview questions, online courses, videos, and more.

Back to all resources
  • Coding Question

    Former interview question: word squares

    Pit yourself against this problem that asks you to write a program that can identify word sequences defined as word squares, and then return all word square sequences within a given list of words.

    Mark as complete Save for later

    • A “word square” is an ordered sequence of K different words of length K that, when written one word per line, reads the same horizontally and vertically. For example:

    BALLAREALEADLADY

    In this exercise you're going to create a way to find word squares.

    First, design a way to return true if a given sequence of words is a word square.

    Second, given an arbitrary list of words, return all the possible word squares it contains. Reordering is allowed.

    For example, the input list

    [AREA, BALL, DEAR, LADY, LEAD, YARD]

    should output

    [(BALL, AREA, LEAD, LADY), (LADY, AREA, DEAR, YARD)]

    Finishing the first task should help you accomplish the second task.

    Learning objectives

    This problem gives practice with algorithms, recursion, arrays, progressively optimizing from an initial solution, and testing.

    Hints

    Related Topics