What’s the longest pair of words that differ by one letter? That is, you can get from one to the other by making a single letter substitution.
After thinking about this question, I figure the answer is probably some related words with -ism/-ist suffixes, for example antidisestablishmentarianis{m|t}. So let’s modify the question with the restriction that the two words aren’t related.
Further modification: What’s the longest pair when the substitution is between vowel and consonant and they are not related? (For the purpose of this question, the vowels are AEIOUY.) If we don’t have the related restriction, there’s hypercholesterolemi{a|c}, which is a pretty boring answer. I’m looking for something more like election/electron (which, despite their similarity, are not related at all, even if you go back to their Latin roots).
That’s a good one. Those aren’t prefixes, but rather the words’ roots.
Just want to make some thing clear that may not have come across from my OP: I’m actually asking two questions. One for any substitution and one for vowel/consonant. Your answer may be the best for the v/c question.
Clearly we get extended length from fancy prefixes and/or suffixes like -istically and -graphically.
It seems English is more generative in suffix land than in prefix land. e.g. -ically can be suffixed onto many other words that are themselves working as suffixes. ISTM prefixes don’t do that as much in English.
To get unrelated meaning we pretty well need to make the substitution in the root word. Unless someone can come up with two widely-unrelated suffixes that share all but one letter.
That first pair could be extended by prefixing both with hyper-. Won’t work for the second pair, at least not if you want to retain meaning.
That’s a point. Let’s add a third question: What’s the longest where all the common affixes have been factored out? And a fourth question: the same with v/c substitution. (Note this requires both words to be able to have the affix removed and still have a valid word. If you can’t do that for both, leave it on.)
This is a total cheat since they’re compound medical terms, and the most distant root is the same, but I can do better:
urethrovaginographically - ureterovaginographically
Urethrovaginography is a word that I totally didn’t make up. So is ureterovaginal. And while I can’t see that my particular words have ever been used before, I claim they’re legit.
Medicine is definitely the region of English that’s most fertile for this.
Lots of compound words already, fairly Germanic attitudes on compounding them further, and lots of lengthy Latin & Greek but little of the short sharp Anglo-Saxon stuff.
I just thought of something else which is at least as big a cheat as is medicine: Chemistry.
Compare (fake made up example) 2-4-5-cyclohexadimethylazide with 2-4-5-cyclohexadimethylamide. There’s -ite vs -ide, -amide vs -azide, alkane vs alkene vs alkyne, and umpteen others I’ve never heard of. Even better, the official rules IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry - Wikipedia encourage stringing all this polysyllabic gobbledygook together in thousand-syllable chains just as the chemists mix the actual goop together to make thousand-molecule polymers.
That’s so target-rich an environment that it almost has to be out of bounds for the thread’s purposes.
