note davisagli I had some fun with this. My shortest fully-functional attempt is this 60-character regexp: <blockquote><code>s/\b(qu|y(?=[^t])|[^\W\daeiouy]*)([a-z']+)/$2.($1||w).ay/eg;</code></blockquote> with these features: <ul><li>Handles multiple consonants at start of word (and handles 'qu' correctly) <li>Correctly handles y-related idiosyncrasies: yummy becomes ummyyay, but yttrium becomes yttriumway and rhythm becomes ythmrhay <li>Handles numbers correctly (42 doesn't become 42ay) <li>Counts apostrophe as part of word, so "don't" becomes "on'tday" (and handles other punctuation correctly)</ul> Note that if we ignore two words (yttrium and ytterbium), we can safely bring it down to 52 chars: <blockquote><code>s/\b(qu|y|[^\W\daeiouy]*)([a-z']+)/$2.($1||w).ay/eg;</code></blockquote> And if we decide to switch to the dialect of pig latin that doesn't add 'w' on vowel-words, it's down to 44: <blockquote><code>s/\b(qu|y|[^\W\daeiouy]*)([a-z']+)/$2$1ay/g;</code></blockquote> If I combine that with [perlmonkey]'s attempt (losing a bit of functionality in the process, although it still works pretty well) I can reach 36: <blockquote><code>s/(qu|y|[^aeiouy\s]*)(\w+)/$2$1ay/g;</code></blockquote> Also note that my (un-golfed) attempt at a pig latin converter in Visual Basic took up almost 3500 characters (!) without handling nearly all of the exceptions mentioned here. This is (one of the many reasons) why I love Perl! Thanks to everyone for their previous attempts, which helped me quite a bit. Comments are welcome. -[davisagli] 3586 3586