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Fun Facts About English #30 – Monosyllabic Words

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Fun Facts About English 30 Kinney Brothers Publishing

A list of 9,123 English monosyllabic words published in 1957 includes three ten-letter words: scraunched, scroonched, and squirreled. Other sources include words as long or longer though some are questionable on the grounds of spelling, pronunciation, archaic status, being nonstandard, a proper noun, loanword, or nonce word.

Nine-letter monosyllables are scratched, screeched, scrounged, squelched, straights, and strengths.

Archaic

The past tense ending -ed and the archaic second-person singular ending -st can be combined into -edst. While this ending is usually pronounced as a separate syllable from the verb stem, it may be abbreviated -‘dst to indicate elision. Examples include scratch’dst and stretch’dst, each of which has one syllable spelled with ten letters plus an apostrophe.

Fun Facts About English Kinney Brother Publishing

Nonstandard

Onomatopoeic monosyllables may be extended without limit to represent a long, drawn-out sound or utterance. For example, Yann Martel’s 1995 novel Self includes a 45-letter Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and a 35-letter Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.

Proper Nouns

Some nine-letter proper names remain monosyllabic when adding a tenth letter and apostrophe to form the possessive:

  • Laugharne’s /ˈlɑːrnz/
  • Scoughall’s /ˈskoʊlz/

Nonce Words

A nonce word is a word created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication, i.e., “for the nonce” or this once. Some nonce words may be essentially meaningless, but they are useful for exactly that reason. For example, the single-syllable word wug was invented by researchers to be used in exercises in child language testing as a word children would not be familiar with.

The poem “Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carroll, is full of nonce words, with two of them, chortle and galumphing, entering into common use. James Joyce’s 1939 novel, Finnegans Wake, used the monosyllabic quark as a nonce word. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann adopted the word in the 1960s as the name of a subatomic particle.

Click on these links to read about the longest word with no vowels, the word with the most consecutive vowels, or the longest word without a repeating letter!

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Fun Facts About English #19 – Words Without Vowels

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Fun Facts About English 19 Kinney Brothers Publishing

When determining how ‘the longest word with no vowels’ is defined, competing words are pared down with criteria that include pronunciation, spelling, and commonality in the contemporary English lexis.

Orthographic conventions typically represent vowel sounds with the five vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u, as well as y, which may also be a consonant depending on context. A word, as it is defined, is “the smallest unit of grammar that can stand alone as a complete utterance, separated by spaces in written language and potentially by pauses in speech.”

There are few words in English that don’t have vowels because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters or are pronounced without vowel sounds. These include cwtch (a shed or hiding place) and crwth (a Celtic stringed instrument), both uncommon words of Welsh origin where w serves as the symbol for the oo sound. Welsh also gives us the vowel-less 15th-century word twyndyllyngs, meaning ‘twins.’ The more contemporary grrrl, (from the phrase ‘riot girl’) describes a subculture of feminism and punk rock.

Abbreviations, if interpreted as words, are often without vowels, e.g., Mrs., Dr., TV, and nth (as in “to the nth degree”). Interjections and onomatopoeias such as shh, hmm, psst, and brr are also examples of “complete utterances” without a vowel. Spellings such as hmmmmmmmmm can be extended ad infinitum and are excluded from the competition.

If you consider ‘y’ to be an eliminating vowel, and don’t include abbreviations or interjections, then the longest lexical word is tsktsks at seven letters.

If you consider ‘y’ to be a consonant and not a vowel, then rhythms is the longest common English word, also at seven letters. In both of these cases, adding ‘s’ to the end of the word pushes the letter counts past the more common six-letter competitors.

Runners-up are six-letter words and one obscure seven-letter word:

  • spryly – An adverb meaning nimbly, agilely or quickly.
  • trysts – Often refers to clandestine or secret meetings.
  • crypts – Places where dead people are buried.
  • myrrhs – The oils and essences used in perfumery derived from a small spiny tree of the same name.
  • syzygy – A noun that mostly translates as ‘a pairing of elements or a fusion of parts.’
  • glycyls – A term in medicine that can be a noun for the acyl radical of glycine, or an extremely complicated adjective referring to glycinic residues in proteins or polypeptides.

If you enjoyed this post, check out the ancient legacy of crossword puzzles! You might also be interested in the challenge of creating ambigams, pangrams, and palindromes!

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If you teach sight words in your ESL classes, Donald’s English Classroom has loads of engaging materials for your lessons. Easy Sight Words worksheets, Bingo, Flash Cards, and more are ready for download! Thanks for visiting!