Can anyone help me? My daughter has asked me, "What is the longest word that can possibly be made using the letters from any *one* row on a keyboard?" Any suggestions? (no proper nouns)

G'day Lady,
What an interesting question! Best I can do is "writeup" off the top line and "flasks" off the second. I will personally donate the Blue Heeler Award to anyone who finds anything in the third line! Welsh excepted!

Hi,

I can't believe this, but it looks like the answer might be
"typewriter" itself. Do you think that was planned? :)


Mark

Well Mark, seems that typewriter is the most common word. Proprietor was another one. Thanks.

There are two longer words that I know of, but as I did not discover them myself, I will leave them as puzzles.

One is twelve letters long and refers to something you may have used in your younger days.

The other is fourteen letters long and hyphenated, meaning roughly "gaudy."

There are also a few more ten letter words.

12 letters: teeter-totter. Thanks for the hint! Still cogitating on the others.

Just want to remind you it has to be on "one line of the typewriter" the dash(-) is on the the line above, but I am curious to know what that 14 letter word is???

...and since the 14-letter one is hyphenated, it's going to look something like 1234567-8900987 (and be pretty hard to pronounce 8).

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter..........
The longest English word that is typed with only the left hand!......12 letters
Three words which contain all the vowels in the correct order! Two are nine letters...one is ten!
Or the four words in the English language that end in "dous"

Tu

let's see... there's infandous and nefandous...

8-)

http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/

tremendous?

My main spell checker accepted nefandous but infandous still escapes both mine and the AWAD spell check....
Where did you look...or are you "pulling my fibula" bone....
Oh I thought the fibula was one....a bone I mean....
There may be at least five words which end in dous....:-(



Tu

Yes! Tremendous.....
Can you help me...Can you find nefandous and infandous anywhere? Or is tsuwm "something" with which I shouldn't try to be in league?

Tu

Is stupendous a word?

okay, I was sort of pulling your leg, tutututu (gotta do something about that stststutter ;). The four *common* English words ending in -dous are stupendous, tremendous, hazardous and horrendous. There a whole bunch of abstruse words ending in -dous, but infandous and nefandous are a couple of old words which deserved a better fate -- they are considered to be obsolete.

Both of these can be found in *my wwftd dictionary, among other places online. Here's the place to go online to start any word search:

http://www.onelook.com/



http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/

I believe that the longest word that can be correctly typed with only the left hand is stewardesses, no?

Oh, and I just remembered that one of the words with all of the vowels in order is facetious . Actually, turn that into an adverb, and you have six in a row, in order.

The other being abstemious. Which, I presume, can be similarly converted into an adverb. Any thoughts on whether y and w should be considered nouns or consonants?

cheer

the sunshine warrior

"Any thoughts on whether y and w should be considered nouns or consonants?"

Why.

Aaaarghh! (But I suppose if puns were good enough for Shakespeare...)

Thanks for that reply. I suppose we are all trying to build up to 'member' status, though I am a bit more slack and dilatory than most...

cheer

the sunshine warrior

Bravo, of course.

Tu

Yes!
And reverberated....
Also 12 letters!
Brava


Tu

OK
How about the right hand.
I can only find one with 8 letters....
Very disappointing. How about alternating hands...This may take some help from my favorite programmer.

Tu

Bravo....
I'll add the six voweled (all in order) to the bulletin board. Thanks.
Besides facetious..there is abstemious...and arsenious...
Are these viable adverbs as well?
I know someone will encourage me to use "onelook".
I'm going...I'm going.

Tu

"Any thoughts on whether y and w should be considered nouns or consonants?"

Why.
------------------------------------------------------------
Y not?

and of course, the shortest word that contains all of the vowels (not in order) is sequoia.

Let's see, there's the standard four, and if you're a chemist, you may come across 'vanadous', 'indous', 'rubidous', 'iridous', 'molybdous', 'scandous', 'palladous', 'rhodous', and perhaps 'radous' (assuming anyone works with compounds of radium). 'Molybdous' comes up fairly frequently; 'iodous' might seem to be a legitimate word as well, but its regular valence is -1, and you can't have one smaller than that. However, an iodine compound with a -2 valence is referred to as 'periodic'!

So what's the longest word you can type with the left hand on the Dvorak keyboard? I get as far as 5, and 3 with the right hand (if you count crossword-clue words :))

--
Trevor Green
"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

What are you guys doing with the other hand?!

Writing a bestseller in longhand of course. Or is it only the female of the species who is so adept at multi-tasking.

Actually I am still waiting for a convincing reason to call "y" a consonant. In every case I know it is either obviously a vowel (as in obviously) or can be plausibly be called one (as in yew.)

"W", on the other hand, is only a "vowel" when silent (hollow, yellow, - compare hello.) By that argument, "T" is sometimes a vowel (as in depot.)

Howdy and welcome, JMike!

Gee, you don't think w is a consonant in "vowel"? :-)

I'm still waiting to find out why y or w should be a noun.

Bingley

I'd have to agree with Bingley on the w part. I've never even thought of considering w a vowel. Whenever a child recites the vowels he doesn't say a-e-i-o-u and sometimes w. Just because it's silent in words such as hollow doesn't make it a vowel, it's not producing any sound, it's just there because that's how they liked to spell it in Old English, and it's just there for looks now.

If we're going to consider w a vowel, then we'd have to make h a vowel as well, because most people don't pronounce the h in honor. These silent letters are just there to balance the word and make it look better. And remember, we have the silent e also.

For the most part, I'm hesitant to consider y a vowel as well, but I'd say that such usage originates in other languages, most likely Welsh.

>>I've never even thought of considering w a vowel. Whenever a child recites the vowels he doesn't say a-e-i-o-u and sometimes w.<<

Guess our age difference is showing, Jazzy--I was taught to say, a e i o u, and sometimes w and y.

>>I was taught to say, a e i o u, and sometimes w and y.

Are you serious? If so, then it's rather strange how a simple phrase would change like that. Really, I've never heard of w being considered a vowel before reading this thread.

>>>>I was taught to say, a e i o u, and sometimes w and y.

Are you serious? If so, then it's rather strange how a simple phrase would change like that. Really, I've never heard of w being considered a vowel before reading this thread.<<

Well, yes, I'm serious. Right here in Kentucky,
approx. 1963. Drummed it into my head pretty well, since I
still remember it after all these years.

'w' is a vowel in some Welsh words which have some usage in English writing, such as cwm (a valley) and crwth (a stringed instrument).

I was also taught "sometimes y and w." That was what prompted my original post - I never could see w as a vowel. (I never thought of the Welsh usage - translations from other languages lead to some awkward constructs. Anyone ever figure out how Xristoul Colon ended up as Christopher Columbus?)

Of course there are the Latin vowels j and v, or is that the Latin consonants i and u? Distinguishing between i/j or u/v didn't happen until about 900 AD (I think - help me here some classical scholar.)

From David Crystal's "Encyclopedia of the English Language":

Page 260:
J
The history of this letter in English dates only from the medieval period. Originally a graphic variant of i (a lengthened form with a bottom-left facing curve), it gradually came to replace i whenever that letter represented a consonant, as in major and jewel. The lower-case distinction did not become standard until the mid-17th century, and there was uncertainty about the upper-case even as late as the early 19th century.

Page 263:
U
The ancestor of U is to be found in the Semitic alphabet, eventually emerging in Latin as V used for both consonant and vowel. The lower-case letter developed as a smaller and rounded form in uncial script. In Middle English both v and u appear variously as consonant and vowel, in some scribal practice v being found initially and u medially. This eventually led to v being reserved for the consonant and u for the vowel, though it was not until the late 17th century that this distinction became standard.


Bingley

vowel: a speech sound produced by the relatively free passage of breath through the larynx and oral cavity, usually forming the most promitnent and central sound of a syllable.

consonant: a speech sound produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream by any of various constrictions of the speech organs.

There are people who specialize in this stuff but I'm not one of them, so I could easily be proven wrong here. (where is Enry Iggins when we need im???) But I would say that the w in vowel is a diphthong (a compound vowel sound) -- ooh eh with the first part rhyming with the vowel sound in cool. Bear in mind that letters are merely an attempt to show us graphically what a word should sound like when spoken.

I think I'll take the rest of the day of for a ghoti-ing trip!

Again from David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language , page 264, talking about the letter w:

W/w usually represents a voiced bilabial semi-vowel, /w/ (wig )and also forms part of digraphs representing several long vowels or diphthongs (cow, saw, knew, owe.

and page 242, discussing the sound:

The distinction between consonant and vowel is fundamental, but some sounds sit uneasily between the two, being articulated in the same way as vowels, but functioning in the language in the same way as consonants. /j/ as in yes and /w/ as in we are like this. ... Similarly, /w/ is formed like a short [u] vowe, but acts as a consonant ( we, me, see ). These two consonants are therefore sometimes described as semi-vowels .

Not 'Enry 'Iggins, but I hope he'll do.

Bingley

The longest word that I can find using the top row of letters is PIROUETTE.

Welcome, violaellie.

Heavens, your name sounds as pretty as your word!

>The longest word that I can find using the top row of letters is PIROUETTE.

It's time now to branch out. Who can make the longest (by letter count) fairly meaningful sentence from the top letter row? I will allow commas and colons, but not semi-colons.

Quite witty, I require pretty quiet typewriter, pour out poetry to requite.

Not a great sentence, but not totally nonsensical either. I get 61 letters.

By the way the longest word available from the top letter row is typewriter.

Using another 10-letter top row word, REPERTIORE, I've created this 65-letter sentence:

We require our typewriter to pour out trite, yet quite witty, repertoire poetry.

WHOA!

WAY TO GO ! MANY kudos to you, Brandon!

>Using another 10-letter top row word, REPERTIORE, I've created this 65-letter sentence:

We require our typewriter to pour out trite, yet quite witty, repertoire poetry.<

Brandon, I will quite shamelessly build on your foundations...

We're pretty quiet, yet we require our typewriter to pour out our trite, yet quite witty, repertoire poetry.

Glad a gal has had asdfghjkl salad. Shall a glass fall as sad lads sag? A sad saga, dad.


Anyone care to try the bottom row of the keyboard?

that flows about as well as your average palindrome.

never liked palindromes

>> that flows about as well as your average palindrome.

True, working with only the vowel 'a' makes for stunted sentences. Reminds me of that curious novella written without the letter 'e' (title currently escapes me). I didn't get past the fourth page because of the evident straining.

>Reminds me of that
curious novella written without the letter 'e'

there is, of course, a word for that kind of writing; to wit, a lipogram. (why *do I know this stuff?!)

that reminds me of one of those keyboarding class workbooks that starts you off with just a few letters, usually the Home key line. a lad; a glad fad; dad had salad . . . yuck!

"lipogram"???

tsunamied again!

in awe...

>that flows about as well as your average palindrome<

So, shall we have a contest for the longest palindrome, or tsuwm, do you already have a pet site lined up for us?

>do you already have a pet site lined up for us?

no; as you may have surmised, I don't much care for palindromes.

A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!

Certainly not in the running for longest, but a curious favorite of mine:
1 pot CO2 = 2 octopi

>>1 pot CO2 = 2 octopi

since when can i and 1 substitute for each other?

>1 pot CO2 = 2 octopi

since when can i and 1 substitute for each other?<

How serious is this linguistic crime? Is it a capital offence?

jazzoctopus,

if ML8 can equal "i'm late", i guess anything's possible.