Okay, what it does is this: in a sed regular expression, you can in fact use any character as an inter field separator - up to and including alphabetic characters. which means: saMooaBinga and s/Moo/Bing/ are semantically the same. So, what this means is that english words can, in fact, be valid sed regular expressions - words like, say, savanna (s/v/nn/) and segregate (s/gr/gat/). Which is nice. So what if these word regexps are then applied to other words? Can we generate valid words by passing a valid word into a word regexp? The answer is yes, we can. And sick.pl finds them :) You might like to just look at sickwords.txt, as sick.pl can take quite a long time to run.