I’m at a restaurant and am arguing with my wife. Help me.
She says ask you guys.
What is the English word with the longest sequence of letters in alpha order?f
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/oddities.shtml
Aegilops, eight letters long, is the longest word whose letters are arranged in alphabetical order. Seven letter words with this property include beefily and billowy. Six letter words include abhors, accent, access, almost, biopsy, bijoux, billow, chintz, effort, and ghosty.
Are you allowing repetitions?
No repetitions if possible.
Also, she asks what about not skipping. So consecutive alpha order.
There are individual words with the letters in alphabetical order, but would you even be able to make a complete sentence with all letters in that order?
Big Bird singing
“Ab-c-def-ghi-jkl-mnop-qr-stuv-wxyz, it’s the most unusual word I’ve ever seen…”
With no skipping, I don’t think you can do better than “hi” or “no”. There are no words that end with “wxy” or “xyz”, and while there are a handful without an a,e,i,o,u, or y, I doubt there would be any with the right surrounding letters.
Def Leppard would disagree with you.
Stuv, has 4 consecutive alphabetical letters, if you accept urban dictionary as a source:
Three-letter combos include crabcake, afghan, hijack, and a slew of R-S-T and S-T-U words. I’m unaware of any legitimate four-letter combos.
Understudy?
I wouldn’t be averse to accepting Urban Dictionary, but that particular entry is really weak. Three completely separate definitions (two of them mutually exclusive), with no consensus support for any of them.
Bravo!
Related but perhaps not of interest to the OP, *facetiously *has all the vowels in alphabetical order.
I stand corrected. Nice one!
Honestly, that’s where we started the discussion…with a question from one of the girls about vowels and words with consecutive vowels.
So does abstemiously
FWIW, my 86 year old mother likes word puzzles - she cracked the facetiously and abstemiously puzzle in an hour or two. Wish I was that sharp…
Not sure where you stand on proper or trade names, but there’s Mnozil’s, a tavern in Vienna; Topquest, an automated college application site; Tuva, the republic in south Siberia known for its throat-singing; and Oxyzone, a maker of ozone generators.