Monday 26 July 2010

More on the subject of one syllable...

Additional to my recent comments on the longest word with only one syllable .....

I found an article suggesting those most commonly cited are screeched (nine letters), scratched, scrounged, scrunched, and stretched. Other sources suggest Oxford English Dictionary also has scraughed, scrinched, scritched, scrooched, sprainged, spreathed, throughed, and thrutched. It includes, too, a single instance of the ten-letter word scraunched, from the 1620 English translation of Don Quixote, a novel by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Yet I cannot see how the suffix -ed can be anything but a syllable in its own right. Thus I suggest the plural nouns straights and strengths (nine letters) are the longest.

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