What one word contains all 26 letters?

some folks should know this

The Only WO'N!

What one word contains all 26 letters?

Alphabet?

Welcome aBoard, int main(void)! Good to see another Canadian on Board. You join the illustrious ranks of belMarduk (from Montreal) and Rouspeteur (Ottawa) and me (Newfoundland)! (and sorry, in advance, if I missed any other Canadian posters here...just doing this off the top of my head...)

I don't really have an answer to your question, though.

And hev - it looks like C code - maybe - but the syntax doesn't quite make sense to me - then again the software I use is from 1989 so I'm just a WEE bit outdated! (Oh well, whatever works!)

1.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog & other pangrams
... black quartz judge my vow. Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox! The quick brown fox
jumps over a lazy dog. Prized waxy jonquils choke big farm vats. A quick brown ...
http://www.navvy.com/pdds/pangram.html

Alphabet

The word does not contain all twenty-six letters; the thing to which the word refers does.

Nit pick alert

I say, I say...it's just an old joke, son! (well, "enigma", really)

Enigma (from The Boys Own Book, 1829):

A word of three syllables seek till you find,
That has in it the twenty-four letters combin'd.
Answer: Alphabet.

More riddles here:
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=wordplay&Number=32709

The Only WO'N!

Quick-wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.

(29 letters total)

int main(void). Hmmm. C programmer?

The word does not contain all twenty-six letters; the thing to which the word refers does.

What is a word, if not synonymous with that to which it refers?

"What is a word," you ask, "if not synonymous with that to which it refers?"

Lewis Carroll answered this thus in "Through the Looking Glass":

-----"You are sad," the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a song to comfort you. The name of the song is called 'HADDOCKS' EYES.'"
-----"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
-----"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS 'THE AGED AGED MAN.'"
-----"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the SONG is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
-----"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called 'WAYS AND MEANS': but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!"
-----"Well, what IS the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
-----"I was coming to that," the Knight said. `The song really IS 'A-SITTING ON A GATE': and the tune's my own invention."

Lewis Carroll answered this thus in "Through the Looking Glass":

Thanks, PhonicAnts! That really clears everything up for us!

--Tweedledum & Tweedledee


The Only WO'N!

LMAO, whitman! I said that was how Lewis Carroll answered it; I never said he answered it clearly! (smile)

Maybe slithy would have a carrollean comment to add?

I, for one, don't care if ARs is the Devil incarnate, I agree with him here. The explanation *is perfectly clear. That the word alphabet is not the same thing as the alphabet is self evident. The one has eight letters and only seven of them different; the latter has twenty-six (in English), all different.

QED

"incarnate", says faldage

Never realized this, but that word seems to combine the root meaning "red" with the concept of "incarnation" (which could be applied to things other than the red devil). Any connection?

There is a sentence, semantically nonsensical but syntactically valid, making use of every letter. It's shorter in length than the ubiquitous "the quick brown fox...", but I can't recall what form it takes.

You should also check out Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable"* about a small island whose inhabitants are prohibited from using letters of the alphabet in their writing and speech as they fall off a statue of the "author" of the Lazy Dog sentence. Their language can only be returned to normal if someone can find a 32-letter (or less) pangrammatic sentence to replace the Lazy Dog one. It's a fun read, but it's also thought provoking.

*That is, a fable in the form of letters written between the characters, in which more and more letters of the alphabet become forbidden.

Re: if ARs is the Devil incarnate,

incarnate, is of course rooted, not in red, but in carn, caro-- flesh (see carnal for more information) not in carmine, based on a arabic word for qirmiz, an insect who's shell is used to create a red dye.

to be incarate, is to be made (of) flesh..
the same root shows up in words like carrion.. and carnage,
and in spanish and italian, the root give rise to the name for butcher(meat) stores.. (i don't remember the exact word in either language, but i remember recognizing the name for such stores was very close to carnivore-- which i knew meat meat eating.. when i was still in elementary school!)

butcher(meat) stores

Carnecería in Spanish. My dictionary shows macellarìa for Italian, from macellare, to slaughter

Makes sense. But is "incarnadine", meaning the red color of blood, also rooted in carne- flesh? It would seem odd, since flesh and blood are not the same color.

Oooh, there's a tasty little nit...

carnicería

Mmmmm, another one...

macelleria

Note the tiny little nit picked off the last i - tasty!

carnicería

macelleria

My bad.

>But is "incarnadine", meaning the red color of blood, also rooted in carne- flesh? It would seem odd, since flesh and blood are not the same color.

ah, but if one were to look it up, one would discover that incarnadine, properly, means the color of flesh; i.e., carnation or pink. but since Shakespeare misused it in MacBeth, it is often used for bloodred!

"This my Hand will rather The multitudinous Seas incarnadine, Making the Greene, one Red."

(and he verbed the adj/noun!)

Hyla,

[chuckle]

Oooh, ooh, ooooh!

Mallecerìa

Speaking of last ì's

Uh, Faldaje...

I fear you're too focused on the nits...

Is a mallecería a place where they make things bad?

Is a mallecería a place where they make things bad?

Geez and a half Louise. Macellerìa. You can see Italian isn't my first language (It's not even my nth language, but we'll let that be.)

Es bleibt dabei, it's macellerìa not macellería.

Harrumph®!

mallecería
Is a mallecería a place where they make things bad?

Nah, Hyla, that's where you go because they have free parking but it takes you an hour to find a hat you like. Where did I leave my car again?

it's macellerìa not macellería

Methinks we need to call in some native speakers. I've lived in Italy on a couple of occasions, but bean and emanuela both have much better Eye-talian than io.

To our italoparlante lasses: Does the butcher's shop get an accent?

And while we're pulling out the polyglottal stops - what's a bleibt dabei?

Does the butcher's shop get an accent?

No. Normally the second-last vowel of a word is stressed in Italian. That's the case for macelleria, too.

There are lots of words where this doesn't apply, though. In these words, the accent is often included in the spelling of the word: university = università, down = giù, coffee = caffé. Dictionaries have different ways of indicating which syllable gets the accent in Italian. I think that wherever Faldage found it might have been the sort of dictionary which indicates accented syllable with an accent above the stressed vowel. (My dictionary does this too, and it is confusing. My textbook, on the other hand, puts a dot under the stressed vowel when it's not the expected one, so you don't get it confused with an accent that's not supposed to be there!)

Anyway, I looked it up in my dictionary, no accent.

You n me's got different dictionaries, Bean. I know in Spanish, e.g., carnicería, the i looks like it might be the penultimate syllable but an i followed by another vowel is normally just a glide and without the accent over the í it would be pronounced [car ni CER ya] (or [car ni ÞER ya], if you're speaking Old World Spanish); the accent indicates that the í gets full value of its own and thus *does become the penultimate syllable. I do not know if the same is true in Italian.

A quick look at the appropriate section of my dictionary and a check of an example indicates that, while the accents, both grave and acute, are used in normal writing of Italian, they are also used in the Italian to English section to indicate unexpected stress, even if they are not so used in the word itself. In the English to Italian section they seem to be used only as written in Italian. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find macelleria in the English to Italian section, neither under butcher anything nor meat anything.

With the Italian stress rule a syllable is equivalent to a vowel (and surrounding, but unexciting, consonants). I'm quite sure there is no accent there, dictionaries aside - it doesn't need one because the stress is where it's expected, on the second-last vowel. The use of accents is limited to situations where the stress is in an unexpected place, and even then, they aren't always used. Approximate pronunciation is "mah-cel-le-REE-ah"

Edit: Sorry, that should be "mah-chel-le-REE-ah". I missed the English "ch" because in Italian c followed by e automatically makes that sound.

Well macelleria is not the word i was thinking of any way... it might have been a pork store.. since both the italian and german neighborhoods had pork stores as well as butchers.. (and the italian ones had ravioli stores, too, that just sold stuffed pasta of every sort, but mostly ravioli's!)
We also had dairy stores, that sold all kinds of cheese, milk, butter and dairy foods, no meats, and appatizing shops oh they were the best..
big barrels of pickles, and olives, bin after bin of dried fruits and nuts, whole spices, tea, coffee, and ready made salads, cole slaw, potato, macaroni, garden, fruit, egg, and something similar to scotch eggs, hard boiled eggs, wrapped in meat, then dipped in bread crumbs, and deep fried-- you could get them hot or cold.. and chopped chichen liver pate and anchovies.. fresh made cottage cheese, farmers cheese and cream cheese, pickled fish, and smoked fish, and all sorts of wonderful foods..

deli's (delicatesians) sold some of the same stuff, but more cold cuts of meats and cheeses-- and they sold ready to eat food, sandwiches to go, (very few foods in appatizing shops were "take out lunches" and if you bought a salad, they didn't stock plastic forks, they way deli's did)

Most of these small shops are gone now, and the deli section in the grocery only has a small selection compared to what used to be available.

and all these stores came in different stripes! you could find italian one, or german ones, or kosher ones.. and each had a different selection! (well, there weren't any kosher pork stores, but everything else!) Bakeries too, Italian bakers and jewish bakers made the best bread, but german and french bakeries made the best cakes, we like a jewish style cheese cake, not italian, and we all disliked italian pasties, but loved ruggala,--but if you wanted a danish, or some pie, off to sutters, the french bakery.. and the best crumb cakes came from the german bakeries!

now days, the best fish stores in ny are chinese, an the best fruit and vegetable stores are korean, and all the dinners are greek, but the street venders are all mid eastern, selling falafals, and other mid eastern foods.

yeah-- i'll have to go into hidding.. its been a while since i did such an obvious food post... the gutter police were long ago corrupted, and now days anything goes... except food posts!