I became unexpectedly obsessed with the alphabetical distance between words

While working on a word puzzle, I found myself thinking about something I'd never really considered before: the "distance" between words in a dictionary.

For example, words like "JELLY" and "JELLO" feel close in multiple ways, but "JELLY" and "JUNTA" are much farther apart not just semantically but alphabetically.

That led me down a rabbit hole of word lists, frequency rankings, and the strange realization that dictionary order itself can become part of a game.

One thing I found fascinating is how much our intuition about word neighborhoods differs from the actual ordering. Common words often cluster together in ways I wouldn't have predicted.

Has anyone else found themselves thinking about words in unusual ways?

For context, this rabbit hole eventually turned into a little word game I've been building: https://nearesto.fun

I'm mostly curious whether anyone here has encountered interesting word relationships or dictionary quirks that surprised them.