I saw a post by @ratatoskK and my mind wandered to Doper names. @Q.Q.Switcheroo already volunteered themselves. I’ll do the P (as it were)…
j
Well, if YOU’RE doing P, I guess I’ll do s, surreptitiously.
It’s a shame you don’t allow proper names. You should play homage to the quasi-town in the SCal desert: Zzyzx.
~VOW
There’s also “continuum”. I have 26 others, but I think they’re all too rare to count as common words.
I think these could be considered reasonably common words:
bathhouse
beachhead
fishhook
fleshhook
highhanded
highhearted
hitchhike
hitchhiker
roughhewn
roughhouse
sleuthhound
touchhole
toughhearted
watchhouse
For “qq”, I found “zaqqum”, but that’s certainly not a common word.
What, you expect me to actually read the posts I reply to?
We have some standards here at the SDMB.
Not many, but some.
Ahem.
I’m not a mathhead, but I do enough crosswords to see radii frequently.
Chukka boots were in style a while back. Pukka isn’t very common in these parts, but I think it might be among the UK folks.
Divvy up the double letters!
From all those old British mysteries I read I know navvy, which is a road worker/day laborer.
Good one!
From the Canadian Railway Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot
qq v
Latin abbreviation; dq’d.
duqqa - as seen on Top Chef and Iron Chef America
Roughhouse has a double h. It’s clearly a compound word, but I have no idea what house means there.
rough-house (n.)
1887, “uproar, disturbance,” from rough (adj.) + house (n.). The verb, “behave or act boisterously or violently,” is attested by 1896.
Basically, to act rough in a house, or start a brawl in a tavern.
The discussion about double-Q words made me look up a Word Ways article by the late (but great) A. Ross Eckler titled “Must You Join the Queue?”. Which is a clever title because it’s basically a list of words that have a Q not followed by U. You can download its image here (only a few pages, so not a long download). Obviously any word with QQ is going to be in such a list. The only one is zaqqum (in Webster’s 2nd Unabridged) which someone above already contributed. The article also has a list of word with QU(consonant), which are even rarer. Zaqqum is in that list too.
Eckler wrote that article in 1976 and I’ve only found a few additions to his lists since then: sheqel (variant spelling of shekel) and niqab for the first list and qubit for the second (all are in M-W online). Duqqa, that others have contributed here, is in Wikipedia, but is not in M-W with that spelling. (M-W spells it dukkah.) Eckler was restricting his list to dictionary words, and of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist then.
Is “bookkeeper” the only English word with three sets of double letters in a row?
I have heard that, but I don’t have any cite.
(Plus variants like « bookkeeping », of course.)
It is. Webster’s 2nd Unabridged has a below-the-line entry for subbookkeeper which has 4 doubled letters in a row. No doubt in the days when large companies had droves of gnome-like creatures writing lots of numbers in ledgers, some of them were called subbookkeepers.