Jason Kottke posed a question on his blog this morning: What is the longest monosyllabic English word you can think of? It's a curious question, since we think of words with one syllable as being all the same length. To be exact, he was thinking of monosyllabic words with a lot of letters. The first thing that popped into my head was "queue." It's only five letters long, but the four vowels are redundant. You need to think of words with many consonants. The comments he got were enlightening. The actual longest monosyllabic English words are recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records, and they feature long strings of consonants.
One commenter suggested "squirreled," which has ten letters in American English and eleven in British English. What? That's two syllables! But he argues it rhymes with "world," which only has one vowel. Language is a funny thing. Syllables are not a function of a word's spelling, but of its pronunciation. There are plenty of English words that can have varying numbers of syllables, depending on the dialect, that we can still easily understand. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Peter Trimming)
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