Forty–The only number that, when spelled out, has the letters in alphabetical order.
…and is derived from the fact that the common gull will try and hatch pretty much any egg-shaped object.
Do y’all remember why smiles is the longest word in English?
Facetiously? Does that almost mean half-seriously?
Few has few letters; several has several. And what about ‘Half a score and six’? Or ‘A baker’s dozen’? (The baker is famous for throwing in an extra item — in this case an apostrophe.)
For most consecutive vowels in an English word, I don’t think you can beat miaouing. You can tie it with some proper names (Omar Khaiyyam, Laura Cayouette) or by pretending blueeyed doesn’t have a hyphen. For most consecutive consonants, try borschts or latchstring.
It’s not what OP is looking for, but I’m impressed with the “trivia” fact that five and cinco are cognates.
Taut is 92 million times longer.
Diabolical
Just a fun word!
I like “obloquy” for no particular reason except that it’s not very common and I once got a lot of points for it in Scrabble. Also very useful in Pit threads.
Similarly, although a little clearer to see, the words “cosmetics” and “cosmos” are cognates.
I just came across the very rare word “marrowsky”, a synonym of “spoonerism”.
Also it’s a not-completely-rare word that is not particularly indebted to foreign influence that nonetheless has no vowel beyond the “u”. I can’t think of a more common word with a “qu” that is not followed by a vowel.
Surely the “y” counts as a vowel here? It is pronounced as the “i” sound in the last syllable in this pronunciation guide from the OED online.
Pronunciation
obloquy/ˈɒbləkwi
I like contumely because it doesn’t look like the noun it is.
Why does *monosyllabic *have to be such a long word?
How about qubit, which is commonly used when talking about quantum computing. I suspect that it’s more frequently used than obloquy.
**Snack **and snot are cognates.
No one has any clear idea where the word bird comes from.
Sphygmomanometer
Most of us just call the thing a “blood pressure meter”.
But I know a really cool guy who taught his 3 year old daughter to point to it, and say it out loud, every time they went to the doctor.
Onomatopoeia - the formation of words whose sound is imitative of the sound of the noise or action designated, such as hiss, buzz, and bang.
It just seems like the perfect word for what it means.
Mississippi.
It’s just fun to spell in a sing-song way.
Also, a joke I found via Google:
What? Why?
Ujiji has four dotted letters in a row. It’s the town in Tanzania where Stanley tracked down Dr. Livingstone.
I agree. Syllable simply has too many of itself, the way I see it.