Words with triple letters

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

These are quite rare. Let’s rule out initialisms or acronyms like AAA and KKK.

So far, all I have found are:

  1. In Gã (language spoken in Accra, Ghana), the future tense prefix is aaa-. An example I found in M.E. Kropp Dakubu’s 1973 Ga-English Dictionary: Kofi aaaba (‘Kofi will come’). I picture the Ghanaian delegation at the U.N. saying this, expecting a visit from their old friend the Secretary-General.

  2. French créée (‘created’, feminine gender). This is the one that made it into the Guinness Book of Records.

  3. All those German words compounded of a word ending with -ß (-ss) and a word beginning with s-. Example: Faßstab (‘barrel stave’), which could also be spelled Fassstab. But I’ve heard this triple s was eliminated in the recent German spelling reform.

Anybody else want to play?

2

According to this site (and others), the only English word with triple letters is goddessship. (Looks made-up to me – but I think I’ve seen others.)

3

This page has a list of them, as well as a couple quadruple-letter words (most of the latter are pretty dodgy though).

4

On the island of Oahu, there’s a town by the name of Kaaawa. When my family and I went to Hawaii, I made a point of going to that town and taking a picture of a sign for it (as well as for Aiea, the only city in the US without a consonant in its name).

5

Hey, nice going, everyone!

That site you linked to ruadh, wouldn’t you know it, every time I get a nifty idea for a linguistic curiosae project, someone else has already done it better. Most of those triple-letter words are German compounds, as you’d expect. I had it backwards—the new spelling reform allows them now!

6

Scarlett, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that uncopyrightable is not the only word in the English language that can be spelled (properly) without repeating a letter.

Dermatoglyphics also has that characteristic. Granted it’s a plural, but that still fits.