Words Formed of Adjacent Letters of the Alphabet

What do the words BAA, CAB, RUST and STRUT all have in common? Each word is formed from adjacent letters of the alphabet, so CAB is made up of A, B and C; STRUT of R, S, T (twice) and U.

So I thought to myself, what's the longest word whose letters are adjacent? To find out I grabbed a long list of words and wrote a short Python script and discovered these two seven letter words:

• POMPOON n. a jewelled hair ornament on a pin (The Chambers Dictionary, 2003)
• TUSSURS n. oriental moths that produce brownish silk (WordNet)

Can you find longer words? What about words in languages other than English?

Part of Speech word cloud of the BNC

Here's a Wordle word cloud which visualises the relative frequencies of the Parts of Speech of all the words in the British National Corpus, it's based on the CLAWS5 tag-set :





Note: The parts of speech that are infrequent and too small to see are Mass Nouns, the verb "Do" and Interjections. "Numbers" is a combination of Ordinals (_ORD) and Cardinals |_CRD). "Others" is a combination of existential "There" (_ EX0) and the negative "Not" (_XX0)

Introduction to Life with Parole

This is a little blog about language. I don't intend it to be very serious or technical but I hope to write about a number of language related topics that interest me. These include:

• grammar and spelling;
• linguistics in general, but especially corpus linguistics and forensics linguistics;
• words, including etymology and word formation;
• foreign and ancient languages;
• word play, for example puns, palindromes and oulipo.