Anu's theme a couple of weeks ago was words with three consecutive letters in strict alphabetical order somewhere in them. tsuwm noted the pattern very early, and I'm sure others did too but didn't comment.

There are many such words. I suppose someone might take up the challenge of finding a representative word with each of the 24 possible combinations, though I suspect the obvious oddballs such as "-jkl-" or "-wxy-" may have no expansion in English. (If you are riding a bicycle in Agra and there is pedestrian in your way, I suppose you might activate your "Taj-klaxon," but that's a bit of a reach, don't you think? And hyphenated, too; that should be against the rules)

Query/speculation/challenge:
-Are there any four-letter-sequence words?
I finally came up with "understudy - are there others?
-How about a word with a five-letter sequence, or longer?
(Has all this been done before and I'm just reinventing the wheel?)

Abcderian and running for cover.

zabaglione? It's from the Italian, but in the English dictionary (food thread warning). That's a three-per, right?...starting with Z at the end and then back to A and B!

The Only WO'N!

No problem with wraparound - it's a nice extension, actually. It's the fours and the fives (if any) I'm wracking my brain over.

I certainly don't want you to be overstudious about it.

I cheated, wofa, but:
Apotemnophobia- Fear of persons with amputations.

Whoa--I found a name for something I suffer from: Automatonophobia- Fear of ventriloquist's dummies, animatronic creatures, wax statues - anything that falsly represents a sentient being.
Things like that--clowns, robot-looking things, whatever--have always scared me; still do, though not to the point of panic. That's why I don't like monkeys, apes, etc. (Hi, SS) They're so close to being human, it unnerves me. I could not stand to watch Howdy Doody when I was a kid. Those things just...give me the creeps.

a real word: understudy!

Came to me while I was watching K. Branagh in Love's Labour's Lost. GREAT movie

Well, I guess I better see if Amazon.com will take back this late birthday present I got for you: Ventriloquism for Dummies.

...anything that falsly represents a sentient being.

... as opposed to those that truly represent a sentient being. (evil-grin)

Ventriloquism for Dummies.
Oh, Ted! I love you!! That one deserves an award!

>anything that falsly represents a sentient being.
must-not-make-John-Howard-jokes

must-not-make-New-Zealander-jokes

And these might interest some of you...

http://rinkworks.com/words/oddities.shtml
http://wordways.com/undom.htm
http://einstein.et.tudelft.nl/~arlet/puzzles/sol.cgi/language/english/spelling/single.words
http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html

This will interest fewer of you...

http://www.sciencenews.org/20000401/mathtrek.asp

http://www.sciencenews.org/20000401/mathtrek.asp

I take it the date of this issue of Science News is significant?!?

Hey, this thread has three doctors posting in it. Alex, where are you?
Thanks for the links, doc_comfort; I bookmarked the first one. Cute hook, on that last one. I liked the quote from the "famed numerologist," April F. Day.
Wofa, I'm surprised you didn't think of 'superstud'...

just to veer a bit from the rstud path, but fearing this should really be posted in Loanwords from German, I offer bierstube.

()

The other one I thought of was gymnopedie (as in Eric Satie), which I had thought was French, but apparently it's AEnglish too. And according to doc_c's links above, these are the only two four-letter sequences in English words, and there aren't any words with longer ones.

Seems hard to believe, somehow.

One who doesn't believe in fortune-telling. - palmnopist.