Just thought I'd share this. (meaning, sentence, grammar, handwriting)

[fuzzymystic]

Word Fun

Read the sentence below carefully…

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications incomprehensibleness”.

This is a sentence where the Nth word is N letters long.
e.g. 3rd word is 3 letters long, 8th word is 8 letters long and so on up to the 20th word has 20 letters.

[jtur88]

I love things like that, there are entire books of them. Sometimes I try to make things up, like the word "nonerroneousnesses", which has no letters that extend above or below the lower-case lines.

The other day, i had to type "warfare" in a comment, and discovered that it is maybe the longest word I've ever touch-typed with one hand.

[Fred314X]

OK, but should contrived words count? I thought the word was "incomprehensibility," not "incomprehensibleness."

And along the lines of interesting factoids: inkwell is the only word in the English language with the 'nkw' combination.

[jtur88]

Originally Posted by Fred314X

OK, but should contrived words count?.

Unlike most Eurpoean languages, English is a "free" language, in which there are no legislated limitations on anything. There are traditional rules of grammar and a conventional orthography, but it is perfectly permissible to bend English any way you like, subject to the style guide of your editor only if your work is for publication.

Useful words can be coined at will, requiring only that their meaning be discernible from their parts. "Disambiguate" appeared for the first time in the 1960s, and now Wikipedia would seem impossible without it.

Hence, in addition to the word 'bookkeeper", we can also have "eellooper" as a triple-double word that means a person who puts the tails of eels into their mouths.

However, English has historically been a strongly non-agglutinative language, and hyphens are heavily used to separate words like 'eellooper', and make it nearly impossible to have triple-letter combinations like 'messsergeant", while permitting 'newsstand'. Unlike German, where it is perfectly fine to use the word 'waffenstillstandgrontbedingungen' which appeared in a speech by Hitler. ("Truce-terms")

I've always had a problem with Scrabble, since English is one of the few languages in which the game does NOT work, since there is no rule about what is an English word and what is not. I can tell you that "The only food you can uncook is spaghetti", but Scrabble permits the verb form "uncooked", but not the infinitive of the verb. So, then, 'uncook' is a "contrived word" . . . . according to whom?