Wow – the column seems to be referring, in circuitous fashion, to one of my own lectures! I taught Data Structures and Algorithms at Johns Hopkins from 1988 - 1990, and I would always open the lecture on queueing by asking the students to name the English word containing the most consecutive vowels. Since the column is dated November 1990, and the Baltimore City Paper carried The Straight Dope, it seems very probable.
I’ve seen both spellings, and was a Scrabble enthusiast, so I made sure queueing was legal in case I ever got a chance to play it. I can’t remember how I justified saying that it was the only word with five consecutive vowels; maybe a brute force search of /usr/dict/words?
Aeaea was the ancient Roman name of Monte Circeo, a mountain headland off the coast of the Italian region of Lazio. Although not technically an island, the ancient Romans identified it with the island of Circe, the enchantress from the Odyssey.
No. In English the differences between “æ” and “ae” and between “œ” and “oe” are merely decorative, not orthographic, just like the difference between “fi” and “fi”.
It probably doesn’t have “queueing” because it’s the Oxford “American”. I’m guessing they tossed out English spellings. But that’s the dictionary that came with my computer.
Does anyone have the electronic OED on their computer? I wonder if the data is in plaintext, and therefore grep-able?
Turns out I was wrong about what dictionary I was grepping:
Welcome to web2 (Webster’s Second International) all 234,936 words worth.
The 1934 copyright has elapsed, according to the supplier. The
supplemental ‘web2a’ list contains hyphenated terms as well as assorted
noun and adverbial phrases. The wordlist makes a dandy ‘grep’ victim.
Indeed!
My GUI dictionary (Dictionary.app) is the Oxford American, which is not in plaintext, and therefore not grep-able.
Does anyone have the electronic OED on their computer? I wonder if its data is in plaintext?
The online OED is certainly not in plaintext. It is based on an SGML transcription of the original OED, which was then updated with material from the four-volume new Supplement of the 70s–80s to create the OED2, and which is being updated now to create the OED3. In order to keep things sane in the online version, the CD-ROM version, and the printed version (though there is doubt as to whether the OED3 will ever be printed), everything is semantically formatted in the main database.
(It is interesting that, in the first volume of the new Supplement, the editor said in so many words that creating an OED2 was an obvious impossibility. By the time the fourth volume came out, the OED2 was already nearly finished.)
As to queueing, as a regular inflected form of queue (verb), not every on-line dictionary will have it in the main index, just as not every dictionary will have “heals” or “listened”. It takes extra work to do that, and not every on-line dictionary has done that extra work, yet. Indeed, it is by far the biggest source of errors in the online OED: for example, dying is now listed as being based on dye, because the old printed version said “the above”, and moving dying out from under die and putting into the main index for online use changed what “the above” meant. (They are aware of the problem, and are fixing it as fast as they can.)
Longest English word containing only one vowel. My nominee:
STRENGTHS
9 letters. Can you beat it?
Beam
p.s. – Not sure if the original letter writer really did hear about “queueing” in my lecture, since I was teaching in Maryland and his note indicated he was from Dallas. Unless he moved, or lied, or something.
If you want to know about vowels or letters or ‘gry’ words or vowel combinations or palindromes or anagram words or see the 20 words with no vowels or … go to this page:
