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orthography - What is the longest word you can come up with that the letters are all in alphabetical order?



It's Friday again, how about some fun to get us into the weekend?


What is the longest word you can come up with for which all the letters in that word are in alphabetical order?


Rules:



  • English words only

  • Can't be a name of a place, person or other proper noun.

  • if it contains the same letter twice in a row, that does not disqualify it.

  • No fair looking it up on Google!


Update: One more rule to help you guys out.



  • The word can be in either ascending or descending alphabetical order.



Answer



OK, well another Friday, another Perl script. Here’s this week’s:


#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my @alphas;
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    my @words = split /s+/;
    foreach my $word (@words) {
        $word =~ s/[^A-Za-z]//g;
        next unless $word =~ /^[A-Za-z]{2,}$/;
        $word = uc $word;
        my @letters = split //, $word;
        my $sorted_word = join '', sort @letters;
        if ($sorted_word eq $word) {
            push @{$alphas[length $word]}, $word;
        }
    }
}

for (1..2) {
    print join "n", @{pop @alphas};
    print "n=====n";

}

This time I used as the input corpus the AGID word list from Kevin’s Word Lists:


And got this output:


AEGILOPS
=====
BILLOWY
DIKKOPS
=====

Aegilops (length 8) is a genus of grasses, and so is proper noun and might not count. Billowy (length 7) is definitely a commonly-used, legit word. Dikkops (length 7), also known as Stone-curlews, are a South African bird.


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