Three letter rule poets such as John Milton alternated between short and long forms for function words, depending on whether they occurred on or off the meter. For instance: While many function words have more than two letters ("and", "she", "were", "therefore", etc.), the exceptions to the rule are rather two-letter content words. Only a few of these occur commonly in most texts: the words "go" (which also has a functional usage in the idiom "going to do something"), "ox" and, especially in American texts, "ax". English grammar is relatively flexible about converting words of one class to another, allowing verbal uses such
Word square place names). However, 11-squares are possible if words from a number of languages are allowed ("Word Ways", August 2004 and May 2005). It is possible to estimate the degree of difficulty of constructing word squares. 5-squares can be constructed with as little as a 250-word vocabulary. Roughly, for each step upwards, one needs four times the number of words. For a 9-square, one needs over 60,000 9-letter words, which is practically all of those in single very large dictionaries. For large squares, the vocabulary prevents selecting more "desirable" words (i.e. words that are unhyphenated, in common use, without contrived inflections,