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  LOGOLOG
a weblog of wordplay by Eric Harshbarger

Word Searching

I've been fascinated by words and wordplay (i.e. "logology") for as long as I can remember. I recall noting my first anagram on a bulletin board in the 3rd grade. I remember being fascinated by the word "skiing" because it had a double-i present; and I remember looking for more such words (TAXIING, HAWAII, NAZIISM, GENII, RADII).

I still have a very old set of pages that I typed on an electric typewriter which details some of the word oddities and patterns I was intrigued by. One task I set for myself early on was to find a word whose length was equal to its initial letter's index in the alphabet (e.g. 1-letter words beginning with "A", 2-letter for "B", et cetera).

This was all done long before computers and searchable wordlists were available to a 9 year old kid. The list I found by scanning a couple of dictionaries I had access to at the time:

A
Be
Cat
Door
Eagle
Forget
Ghastly
Habitant
Innocence
Jackrabbit
Kitchenware
Luminescence
Megalomaniacs
Neocolonialism
Ophthalmologist
Parapsychologist
Quasquicentennial
Radioimmunological
Straightforwardness
Thermophosphorescent
Ultraminiaturizations
V
W
X
Y
Z
Since then, of course, I've obtained more dictionaries (I own five or six unabridged tomes at this point), plus the Merriam Webster's Third New International [MW3] came with a nifty CD-Rom that makes searching much easier (it almost feels like cheating, really).

Unfortunately, I have not been able to improve upon the list above. Things still crap out at the 21-letter "V" stage.

I have, however, been able to get a more thorough list of the following sort:

                         A
                         B
                         C
                         D
    dehydroepiandrosteronE
                         F
      deinstitutionalizinG
       cinephotomicrograpH
                         I
                         J
          DneprodzerzhinsK
           immunogeneticaL
            sensationalisM
             interrogatioN
              clavicembalO
               stewardshiP
                QaraqalpaQ
                 lengthieR
                  whisperS
                   chemisT
                    bureaU
                     ollaV
                      ploW
                       taX
                        aY
                         Z
The entries for -E, -G, -H, -K, -Q, and -V are all new to me (I just looked them up while typing this webpage). Yes, some of them are rather obscure words (and a couple are designated as "usually capitalized"), but they do all appear in my MW3. There are many other lexicons out there, however, so maybe a few more of the blanks can be filled in.

Even with all of the new technology, word searching is not yet a completely trivial task.

-- Eric

P.S.: The first word challenge above has been so close to my heart that I included it as a puzzle at my First Puzzle Party (Puzzle #4).

[8 December 2005]
   
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Comments about this article:
You could extend your first list with

vaginoperineorrhaphies
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vaginoperineorrhaphy)

or, possibly,

videonystagmographical
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/videonystagmography)

Posted by: Eric S.


 
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