HuH? this word is in a head line of today's NY times book review-- about a self confessed word freak-- (book is WORD FREAK, Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis} but it is not defined (except as an isogram--a word with no repeating letters.) anyone want to go for it?
Neither M-W nor Bartleby admit to any knowledge of this "word" (sic) although M-W (bless it's fuzzily logical little heart) suggests Episcopalianism, obscurantist and variations thereupon. I suspect it's a "word" (sic) that someone made up in a vein attempt to mine the possibilities of the longest vaguely pronounceable word in which all the letters are in alphabetical order.
Good one, Helen! This will surely test us all... well, except maybe for tsuwm. (Google scratched its little cyber-head when I tried there). I'm guessing it's used in the reviewed book and may have been coined by the author, for the reason Faldage cited or maybe as a Scrabble word under made-up rules.
~~~~~~~ vein
Nother good one, Faldage, you old lode of puns & info!
I didn't expect i would stump every one-- maybe i'll send a note to the times and ask them for the meaning.. at first thought, i suspected a medical term Ab (as in abnormal) ceghil (as in EKG-- where the K can alternately be a c, ceghilGram. .?) some thing to do with brain functions.. it is the noprtuy that i cannot make any sence of. Doc Comfort? Alex? Dr Bill? a term for an abnormal EKG reading? or am i totally off the track..
When I saw this word for the first time up on the lists I presumed it was some sort of puzzle and that the missing letters formed a word. Some clever attempt by Helen to test we-of-the-bigger-brains. Alas, no. That gives us dfjkmqsvwxz.
As for this being a 'real' word. I doubt it. No references anywhere to it and it is quite a stupid and lazy attempt by someone to coin a new word using letters once in alphabetical order. But there's something in that idea.......
Were it not for the absence of s from this sequence, I would say it had something to do with the relative values of the various tiles for scoring purposes in scrabble. etaoin shrdlu is all there except for the s, and all of the highscoring letters are among the letters relegated to the putative "other word" dfjkmqsvwxz.
My bet is that any top-level scrabble player knows what this means. I'm sort of surprised that tsuwm doesn't.
relative values of the various tiles for scoring purposes in scrabble®
I dunno. Your boundaries are a little sloppy there. S (not in the "word") is one point and Y (in the "word") is four (for example). There're others. See http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/scrabble.html
he doesn't 'cuz it ain't never no word! (and it would hardly be utile in scrabble since you'd need to find (at least) an eight-letter root therein to add on to!!)
"abceghilnoprtuy": I have no idea -- but does this suggest anthing to anyone out there: ABC d E f GHI jk L m NOP q R s TU vwx Y z Could it be completely unrelated to word-meaning, but instead a numerical pattern for picking which letters to include? The repeated groups of "three consecutive letters of the alphabet" may be a clue.
Mr. Fatsis was interviewed on Saturday Weekend Edition on NPR about this book. I have emailed Mr. Fatsis in care of Weekend Edition. The following is the text of my email.
Dear Mr. Fatsis
The matter of your book on Scrabble® came up on a message board I frequent, particularly in reference to the purported word "abceghilnoprtuy". The common belief that we have decided upon is that the word has no meaning and was just a vaguely pronounceable collection of unrepeated letters in alphabetical order (and we have some serious word experts, including one who has a daily email with the worthless word for the day). If you can disabuse us of this notion we would appreciate it. If we are spot on we would appreciate knowing that, too.
tswum says: "it ain't never no word" If it were, that 15-letter "word" would shatter not one but two records*, which is too much of a coincidence to be credible. Rubrick has to be correct: an attempt by someone to coin a new word using letters once in alphabetical order
Dunno how the selection was made, but: TEd says it almost matches "the relative values of the various tiles for scoring purposes in scrabble®" (Faldage says the match is imperfect: "Your boundaries are a little sloppy there") Bet the "selection rule", whatever it is, produced that result. That is, you'd get such a result by starting with a brief phrase, alphabetizing the letters, and eliminating duplicate letters. It would be a close but imperfect match to the letters' relative frequency of usage. ~~~~ *1) Longest word with all letters in alphabetic order (the longest I know of is 7 [with a doubled letter] or 5 [without]) 2) Longest word with no letter occurring twice or more (the longest I know of is 11)
well, the mystery is solved, but if you look up the word anticlimax in your MW10....
here's a hint, in an attempt to salvage some entertainment value from this thread. it's a kinda sorta anagram, which is to say it ain't a word or even an attempt to coin one.
I haven't a guess about the kinda sorta an anagram, but here are some of the results of an anagram sort:
A HYPERBOLIC TUNG CHERUB LYING ATOP A BRUCE THONG I PLY I, A LYNCHBURG POET TYLER, A PHOBIC GNU A PHOBIC UGLY TERN A PRONE UGLY BITCH BRUNCH A LOT YE PIG RIPLEY GOT A BUNCH COLBY A GUNTHER, PI GONE HIP? TRY A CLUB TO A BE RUNIC GLYPH ROUGH PLY CABINET
got it in one(1), agent96. and now, the rest of the story:
recall that the book from which this was culled describes the world of competitive Scrabble®. Scrabble players are prone to exercising their minds by taking a set of letters and unscrambling them to make words. first, they make an alphagram, the alphabetical sequencing of the letters. this particular alphagram is a special case called an isogram, in that it has no repeating letters. It also happens to be the longest isogram in MW10, which is the official Scrabble source for words longer than 10 letters (the Official Scrabble Dictionary, Third Edition is used otherwise).
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