I found this site while looking up a word related question. I am not sure if it's accurate (really...screeched and strengths are the longest one-syllable words?), but some of the facts are interesting: Longest words that can be typed with the left or right hand or with alternate hands. The longest words without vowels. A word with 5 consecutive vowels. And so on. Do you see any "facts" here that are incorrect?

Any fun word facts of your own?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Do you see any "facts" here that are incorrect?

Sure. Shove someone off a cliff and you get a very long (depending on the height of the cliff) one syllable word, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...." As for words typed with two hands: What's this? You can type using BOTH hands?

I love the sentence with all pronunciations of "ough" (no. 14).

Hey, doethn't 'dunthe' rhyme with 'month'?

I like bookkeeping having three consecutive double letters.

The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent.'"
--Alfred Brendel,
Austrian pianist

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
(really...screeched and strengths are the longest one-syllable words?)

I believe that they are the longest words in terms of letters, but in terms of pronunciation there might be longer one syllable words. My feeling is that in my speech "charge" is longer than "strengths" but I'd have to measure them to know for sure.

Going down the list:

1, 2, 3 are not worded correctly since you can type ANY word in the dictionary using just one hand -- in fact, just the index finger on either hand.

7. If the list is meant to only use English words, then this is wrong since the city name is in the Hawaiian language.

10. Actually this is pronounced with two syls in at least one case, as in George Dubya Bush.

13. The lower case “t” is not symmetical.

Well, proof, I would disagree with you about 1,2,3, 7 and 10. If I understood what 13 meant, I'd probably disagree then, too.

For 1, 2, and 3, they mean using your left hand as though you were typing. Number 7 is a U.S. city, which is all they asked about in the question. For number 10, I certainly say W with 3 syllables. But I really don't get number 13.

In 13, if you turn the "t" the tail points in a different direction, losing its symmetry.

While they may have "meant" using only the keys on the left-hand side, that is what they should have said. But anyone can use either hand to type ANY letter.

Apparenly Texans (or perhaps other Southerners) only use two syls for "W" (Dub-ya). Otherwise George is an idiot.

Exactly. 1,2,3 obviously mean "typed using the conventional system of typing" where specific letters are allocated to each hand.

4 is clearly wrong though because there is an obvious word longer than "rhythm" that doesn't contain a,e,i,o or u. RHYTHMS

7 So what's the name of the city in American then?

12 and 13 depend on the font being used. "t" is symmetrical in some.

quote:

Apparenly Texans (or perhaps other Southerners) only use two syls for "W" (Dub-ya). Otherwise George is an idiot.

Yes? And your point would be?

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:

7. If the list is meant to only use English words, then this is wrong since the city name is in the Hawaiian language.

It's also in the English language. (In Hawaiian it's spelled ʻAiea.)

The point about the Hawaiian city is that no ENGLISH word is composed of all vowels. That particular city was chosen just to make an invalid assumption. If you were to choose an American city with a Spanish name just because it had an unusual punc mark over a letter, that also would be invalid. (There aren't any of those but you get the idea.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Proofreader>,

My point is "Aiea" is an English word. It was borrowed from Hawaiian, but it's a location in an English speaking island (the vast majority of people in Oʻahu speak English), it's used by thousands of English speakers as they go about their business in Honolulu, it's an English word.

Sorry, but that city name is a Hawaiian word which we use instead of Anglicizing it. Lots of English speakers use foreign city names every day but that doesn't make them English. We're discussing English word structure and oddments of that framework. When we translate other languages, we adapt them to our grammatical features, or else we'd have a bunch of backward "r"s every time we wrote a Russian word.

I posted this already, I thought, but it's gone missing.

If the English name of the city isn't Aiea, what is it, and does it contain a consonant?

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
Sorry, but that city name is a Hawaiian word which we use instead of Anglicizing it. Lots of English speakers use foreign city names every day but that doesn't make them English.

Then what does make them English? We have Anglicized Aiea. We don't write it with an okina (we write Aiea, not ʻAiea). I've been to Hawaii and people use a lot of Hawaiian place names and they are all Anglicized. That is, they don't pronounce them as if they're Hawaiian words, they pronounce them as if they're English words. For instance, the name of the island that contains Honolulu is Oʻahu, it contains a glottal stop in Hawaiian. But no one pronounces it with a glottal stop.

We don't write it with an okina (we write Aiea, not ʻAiea).

And, just to be pedantic, but the okina 'glottal stop' is a consonant. So, in Hawai`ian the word is not all vowels, and in English (or anglicized) it is most probably also pronounced with a glottal stop at the beginning.

The city name has been ADOPTED into the English vocabulary, but the word itself is NOT English and should not be used to substantiate a claim that it is the only name that is all vowels. Tkhe English language does not allow words to be created that lack consonants. I totally agree that the word has been accepted, as have other Hawaiian words, as part of the culture but we're talking about words formed in English, not words adopted from another language with different rules.

I do wonder if any of these fun facts about words are true, but I am not going to spend any time trying to find out!

I do appreciate having the word "Quartzy" up my sleeve for my next killer Scrabble game, however. As in, "Your eyes look a little quartzy with that fixed stare!"

WM

zmjezd is right, in Hawaiian the word contains a consonant letter, and in English it doesn't.

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
Tkhe English language does not allow words to be created that lack consonants.

How do you know? The OED has a, ai, aa, and probably others.

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
I totally agree that the word has been accepted, as have other Hawaiian words, as part of the culture but we're talking about words formed in English, not words adopted from another language with different rules.

But... adoption from another language is one of the major ways that new words come into English. This post alone has about 20 words borrowed from other languages.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

OK, just one little quibble: Rhythms is not the only 7-letter word using only consonants. According to a Scrabble word finder here, it is joined by

GLYCYLS and TSKTSKS

Not that I would ever use such a cheater page in an actual game of Scrabble!
WM