A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, Page 4

MISCELLANY 4 SCRAUNCHED (10 letters) and SCROONCHED may be the longest monosyllabic words in W3. The OED2 has the obsolete STRENGTHED and STREYNGTHES. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000) has SCROOTCHED as an alternative spelling for scrooched. Some nine-letter monosyllabic words are CRAUNCHED, SCHLEPPED, SCHLUMPED, SCHMEERED, SCHMOOZED, SCRAICHED, SCRAIGHED, SCRATCHED, SCREECHED, SCROOCHED, SCROUNGED, SCRUNCHED, SKREECHED, SKREIGHED, SPLOTCHED, SQUELCHED, SQUINCHED, SQUOOSHED, STAUNCHED, STRAIGHTS, STRENGTHS, and STRETCHED [Philip Bennett, Stuart Kidd].

In addition, MWCD10 shows a one-syllable pronunciation of SQUIRREL, so presumably the 11-letter SQUIRRELLED could be pronounced as one syllable. Craig Rowland writes, "All dictionaries designate this word to be of two syllables, but frankly I don't know any Canadian who says it as any way but one."

SET is the word with the longest entry in the OED2. In the OED2, the verb set has over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words. In W3, the longest entry is TAKE. The longest entry in RHUD2 is RUN, with 178 definitions [Dan Tilque].

Dan Tilque has compiled a list of what he calls "shape words," terms in English that are composed of a single letter and a word (or two), where the letter describes the shape of the object. He attempts to show one word for each letter of the alphabet, but several letters are missing. His list: A-frame, C-clamp, D ring, f-hole, F clamp, G clamp, H hinge, I beam, J-bar lift, K truss, L square, M roof, O-ring, P trap, S curve, T-shirt, U-turn, V neck, W-engine, X chromosome, Y theodolite, and Z bar.

SUBBOOKKEEPER is the only word found in an English langauge dictionary with four pairs of double letters in a row. This word is in W2, but is not in W3 or OED2. WOOLLOOMMOOLOO, according to the Australian Encyclopedia and various editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the original spelling of Woolloomooloo, a suburb and bay in Sydney, Australia [Susan Thorpe]

[Bob Erndt suggests there ought to be someone who has a raccoon that has a nook that needs cleaning, namely a RACCOONNOOKKEEPER. And from Bo Parker: At a dam, there is a flooddoor. The controls for the flooddoor are in the flooddoorroom. Let's say the the boss at the dam calls a meeting in the flooddoorroom. The people who go to this meeting are FLOODDOORROOMMEETINGGOERS. And James Lehmann suggests: In the flooddoorroom, there is a book, which explains how to use the controls for the flooddoor, a FLOODDOORROOMBOOK, in which all four double-O's are pronounced differently.]

HUBBUBBUBBOO (a confused crying or yelling, OED) is the shortest word with four pairs sets of double letters [Stuart Kidd].

KEELLESS and ASSESSEE appear to be the shortest words with three double letters. EELLESS is possible but does not appear to be an actual word [Pierre Abbat, Stuart Kidd].

COOEE is the shortest word with two double letters [Pierre Abbat].

AA is the shortest word with one double letter [Pierre Abbat].

SYZYGY and ZYZZYVA, when written in cursive, have five letters in a row which descend below the line. SYZYGY is also the shortest word with three Y's.

TARAMASALATA (a type of Greek salad) and GALATASARAY (name of a Turkish football club) both have an A for every other letter. OCONOMOWOC (a town in Wisconsin) has an O for every other letter.

TAXI is spelled the same way in eleven languages, according to Dixon: English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Portuguese. Jeff Volgyi reports it is also spelled the same way in Hungarian. G. Strauss reports it is also spelled the same way in Romanian. However, Emerson Werneck says that in Portuguese, taxi is actually spelled táxi.

Emerson points out that SAUNA is spelled the same way in nine languages: Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, and Danish. Readers of this page have reported it is also spelled the same way in Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Norwegian (although in Norwegian the word badstue is more commonly used) [Juozas Rimas, Nikola Petrovic, Gabriel Ionita, Thor-Rune Fiskum].

Dan Tilque has found that VETO is the same in at least 24 languages: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, SerboCroatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. In Hungarian it is spelled the same except for a diacritic. In Basque and Tagalog it's spelled 'beto' and in Polish it's 'weto'.

THERBLIG, a unit of workplace efficiency, is a word created by spelling approximately backwards the last name of engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and psychologist Lillian Gilbreth. THERBLIG is not in MWCD10; the three words in MWCD10 that were created as anagrams are SPANDEX (for "expands"), SIDEBURNS (for "burnsides"), and ITACONIC ACID (for "aconitic acid," from "aconite.") Placenames formed by reversing the name of the state or country in which they are located are ADANAC (a village in western Saskatchewan, Canada), ADAVEN (in Nevada), and SAXET (in Texas).

THEREIN is a seven-letter word that contains thirteen words spelled with consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein [Stuart Kidd]. THITHERWARDS contains 23: thitherward, thither, hi, hit, hithe, hither, hitherward, hitherwards, I, it, ither, the, he, her, er, wa, war, ward, wards, a, ar, ard and ards [álainn cruic]. SHADES contains hades, shade; ades, hade, shad; des, ade, had, sha; es, de, ad, ha, sh; S, E, D, A, H, all of which are in W3. ["Word Torture," by Ralph Beaman, Word Ways.]

The Indian cities TIRUCHCHITTRAMBALAM and TIRUCHCHIRAPPALLI both have the rare -chch- sequence, as do ARCHCHRONICLER, MLECHCHHA (W3, a person in India who does not practise Hinduism), ARCHCHAMBERLAIN, ARCHCHANCELLOR, ARCHCHANTER, ARCHCHEMIC, KACHCHAN, and CHUCHCHI (a rare mushroom Morchella conica) [Juozas Rimas, Stuart Kidd, Philip Bennett].

TROLLIED seems to be the longest word in W3 with the letters in reverse alphabetical order. There are also SPOON-FEED and SPOON-FED (although these words are usually spelled with hyphens), SNIFFED, SPIFFED, SPOOFED, SPOOKED, SPOOLED, TROOLIE (a palm tree), and TSONECA (a Patagonian language). SPONGED and WRONGED are the longest such words if repeated letters are not allowed [Stuart Kidd].

UNCOPYRIGHTABLE (15 letters) is the longest word in common use with no letter appearing more than once. Other such words: SUBDERMATOGLYPHIC (17; not found in any dictionary, but occurring in an article in Annals of Dermatology), MISCONJUGATEDLY (15), DERMATOGLYPHICS (15; Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictionary), AMBIDEXTROUSLY (14), TROUBLEMAKINGS (14), SCHIZOTRYPANUM (14; Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictionary), VESICULOGRAPHY (14; Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictionary), UNDISCOVERABLY (14), BENZHYDROXAMIC (14), HYDROMAGNETICS (14), HYDROPNEUMATIC (14), PSEUDOMYTHICAL (14), SULPHOGERMANIC (14). Placenames with this property include BRICKLEHAMPTON (Britain), GUMPOLDSKIRCHEN (Austria), MALITZSCHKENDORF (Germany), BRIDGEHAMPTON (NY), GUMPOLDSKIRCHEN (Austria), MADRITSCHENGUPF (Austria), STRICHWANDKOGEL (Austria), MORICHELYPUSZTA (Hungary), FJORDHUNGZKVISL (Iceland), HONDEBLAFSPRUIT (South Africa), DJUPBACKSHOLMEN (Sweden), HOGLYCKSFJARDEN (Sweden), and SOUTH CAMBRIDGE (NY). [Some of the long place names are from Word Ways.] Stuart Kidd, who contributed many words to this list, says that MELVIN SCHWARTZKOPF of Illinois has the longest name with no letter repeated. Andrew Davis reports that he lives in BUCKFASTLEIGH (in Devon, England), which has 13 letters and no letter repeating.

UNDERFUND and UNDERGROUND are the only words in MWCD10 which start and end with 'UND.' However, UNDERSOUND and UNDERWOUND yield many hits on Internet search engines [Stuart Kidd, Philip Bennett].

UNPROSPEROUSNESS is the longest word in which no letter occurs only once.

USHER contains four personal pronouns (us, she, he, her). USHERS has HERS as well, for a total of five personal pronouns [Stuart Kidd].

UVULOPALATOPHARYNGOPLASTY is the longest word that does not contain an E. E is the most frequently occurring letter in English (and French, Spanish, and German). Mark Smith reports the word refers to a surgical procedure for (most commonly) men with advanced sleep apnea, wherein the breathing passage is opened by removing the uvula, shortening the palate and removing the tonsils. Other long words lacking an E are HUMUHUMUNUKUNUKUAPUAAS, PHONOCARDIOGRAPHICALLY, PRORHIPIDOGLOSSOMORPHA, SUPRADIAPHRAGMATICALLY, and MACRACANTHORHYNCHIASIS.

WACO and WARE are the only U. S. radio station call letters that exactly spelled the cities in which they were located (Waco, Texas, and Ware, Massachusetts). KING FM and TV station is in King County (Seattle), Washington. WHT in Deerfield, Illinois, and WGHF in New York were apparently the only radio call letters that exactly matched the owners' initials (Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson and William G. H. Finch). Television station WRGB in Schenectady was named for GE executive Walter R. G. Baker.

Many suffixes in English change masculine words into feminine. According to Stuart Kidd, only one works in reverse, converting a feminine noun to masculine: WIDOW/WIDOWER. The only case where a prefix, not a suffix, feminizes a masculine term is with the female for REP (a disreputable man): a DEMIREP.

There is only one word beginning with X in Noah Webster's first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806). The word is XEBEC.

In all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, excluding Roman numerals, only one word begins with X. The word is XANTHIPPE (the wife of Socrates). It is found in The Taming of the Shrew [Nelson H. F. Beebe].

Jefferson B. Morris points out that www as an abbreviation for "World Wide Web" has 9 spoken syllables, whereas the term being abbreviated has only 3 or 4 spoken syllables. A similar occurrence is WWII for "World War II."