This is making the assumption that you are working with a non-accentuated latin alphabet. That's too restrictive (it would rule out any non latin alphabet in particular). We would need a regexp that accepts any Unicode code point from the "Alpha" class. `\p{Alpha}\w+` would work in java but unfortunately not supported by the `re` module of the standard library. Maybe the following would work `r"(?u)\b[^\d\W]\w+\b"`.