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Fun Facts About English #76 – The Longest Isogram

10/23/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing uncopyrightable

OK, word nerds, this post is for you!

An isogram, also known as a nonpattern word, is a word with no repeating letters or, more broadly, a word in which the letters occur an equal number of times. This category of words can be further subdivided into first, second and third orders, words with repeating pairs, words that can be transposed, words equally divided between the first and second half of the alphabet and… well, you get the picture.

In addition to being an isogram, the meaning of uncopyrightable is ambiguous. It could mean “able of being un-copyrighted” or “unable of being copyrighted.”

Because of the paucity of 15-letter non-pattern words, attempts have been made to add to their numbers by “coining” more of them. They include misconjugatedly, hydroneumatics, and prediscountably. Possible 16-letter words are uncopyrightables and subendolymphatic.

twelve-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

Isogrammatic Orders

First-order isograms, like uncopyrightable, are words where each letter appears only once. 14-letter isograms include ambidextrously, troublemaking, and demographics.

Second-order isograms, where each letter appears twice, are Vivienne, Caucasus, couscous, intestines, and deed.

Third-order isograms, where every letter appears three times, are deeded, sestettes (a spelling variant of sextets), and geggee (a victim of a hoax).

The longest first-order isogrammatic place name, at 14 letters, is Bricklehampton, a small village in Worcestershire, England.

eleven-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

If you’re interested in more word oddities and trivia, get your favorite beverage and check out this site by Jeff Miller (who also has a pretty mean collection of dictionaries!) Peruse this compendium of online resources for wordplay, puzzlers, making word clouds, and saving endangered words.https://www.kinneybrothers.com/blog/blog/2020/12/22/fun-facts-89-collective-nouns/

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to know the word with the most consecutive vowels, what makes a word autological, or where collective nouns like, “A murder of crows” come from!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Donald's English Classroom

Trends: Business and Culture Reports, Books 1 & 2, bring you sixty topical Business Reports that will entertain, inform, and prompt your adult intermediate and advanced students toward lively discussions. Utilizing charts, graphs, puzzles, surveys, discussion activities, and more, these Business Reports invite students to explore and compare cultural, business, and language matters.

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Filed Under: Fun Facts About English Tagged With: Donald's English Classroom, esl, ESL Activities, ESL Flash cards, ESL teaching, esl textbooks, fun facts about english, kinney brothers publishing, uncopyrightable

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