Words with Four vowels in a row
A friend of mine posted on his LiveJournal:
“maeiusophilia”
There aren’t many English words with four vowels in a row.
Of course, geek that I am, I thought ‘hm, that sounds like a challenge.’
Using egrep and /usr/share/dict/words, I came up with the following:
In my /usr/share/dict/words, it looks like:
4: 159
5: 3 (cadiueio, Chaouia, Guauaenok)
6: 1 (euouae)Excluding proper nouns (or at least, things capitalized in the first letter), we get 110, 1, 1. Of the four-vowel words, 7 have only 5 letters; another 6 have only 6 letters.
An arbitrary selection of 4-vowel words: homoeoarchy, obsequiousness, palaeoencephalon, queue, lieue, rhythmopoeia, exsanguious.
(Normally, I’d have done a random selection instead of an arbitrary selection, but `sort` on OS X doesn’t have the -R option, sadly, and I didn’t happen to have an ssh connection to elsewhere open at that particular second.)
This feels like the kind of question I’d love to use as a job interview question someday.
February 23rd, 2012 at 10:57 am
I’ll go one better ‘queueing’ it has 5 vowels in a row.
January 11th, 2013 at 7:47 am
The correct spelling for “queuing” has only four vowels in a row. The last “e” in the infinitive “queue” is dropped when using the present participle. This is the general rule for verbs ending in “e”, such as shaking, baking, raking, driving, etc.
March 17th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
Aqueous also has 4 vowels
March 27th, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Hawaiian should have been one, right?
April 3rd, 2013 at 10:49 am
Onomatopoeia
April 4th, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Onomatopoeia
May 5th, 2013 at 11:00 pm
The word “châteauesque” has its own Wikipædia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teauesque although I would argue it’s not really an English word.
May 20th, 2013 at 11:35 am
Looking for word with the following definition: inclined to laugh; ability to laugh. The word had four letter “i’s in it and I believe it started with “sim …
Can’t recall word need help.
June 24th, 2013 at 1:35 pm
How about sequoia?
July 14th, 2013 at 6:21 pm
plateaued (as in, his performance plateaued in mid-march)
September 25th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
@William: Risibility?
October 3rd, 2013 at 11:22 pm
gooier and gooiest
May 28th, 2014 at 5:14 pm
sequoia
July 10th, 2014 at 8:41 pm
queued! and the repetition of ue ue is pretty unusual too I thought 🙂
October 22nd, 2014 at 7:59 pm
Queueing IS a thing!
Either is ok.
November 10th, 2014 at 11:46 pm
maeiusophilia is spellled wrong.
December 13th, 2014 at 9:28 pm
If you count Y as a vowel, there’s also “yoyo(s)” and “yoyoing.” I throb the latter is a word.
“Yoyoed,” maybe?
April 16th, 2015 at 4:15 pm
I believe that ‘Y’ isn’t a vowel in this content if you were to use it in another way maybe it would be classed as a vowel but ‘Y’itself OR with a word isn’t a vowel in he case
April 16th, 2015 at 4:16 pm
In this case*