For many years I've known that billowy is the longest word in the English language in which the letters occur in alphabetical order. I don't know who figured that out; I read it as a bit of wordplay trivia somewhere way back when.

I imagine that words in which the letters are arranged alphabetically backward are commoner. The other day I happened to notice sponged -- because it came up in my rack in a Scrabble game online. I've got my settings set so that my rack is alphabetized by default, and it came up DEGNOPS.

I'm sure there are plenty more. For starters, there are four variations on the theme: spooned, spooled, spooked and spoofed. (The Scrabble dictionary -- even the unexpurgated version -- doesn't acknowledge spooged.)

Any with eight letters? Chambers allows spoonfed, but respectable dictionaries want a hyphen. Even Chambers wants the hyphen for spoon-feed.

Now I see trolled, spilled and spiffed. I still don't see any seven that doesn't end in -ed.

11:20:07 PM  [permalink]  comment []