Words of the day (with lots of vowels)
According to a Mexican friend of mine, murciélago (bat) is the only Spanish word with all five vowels.
In English, we have facetiously, which has all 5½ vowels (y is the half) in alphabetical order. I also like the words vacuum and aardvark for the unusual double vowels.
The coolest may be the French word jouaient (third person plural imperfect of jouer – to play), which has all five vowels in a row! And créée (the feminine past participle of créer – to create) with its triple E.
Any other vowel-laden words?
9 comments
Permalink1
Yes, absolutely. How about
some German ‘monster’ words like
“Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän” = Danube
steamship company captain, or even
longer:
“Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”
(63 letters)
= “beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law.”
This was a 1999 German
Word of the Year, and it also won a special award as the longest German word for that year.
Obviously, there are lots of vowels to hold the consonants together.
I liked
your examples too! I speak French as well and was never aware that in “jouaient” five vowels
were grouped together!
Permalink2
In Spanish, “quincuagésimo” (fiftieth) has all the vowels. It might be useful
to point
out that in Spanish there is sometimes confussion between words indicating order and those
indicating fraction due in part to the fact that they sometimes coincide: “el octavo” means
“the eigth” while “un octavo” means “one eight”.
Permalink3
BENI-OUI-OUI is a French word
meaning “yes man” which has the greatest number of vowels in a row – seven.
Don
Permalink4
words, words, words
Not quite on the
subject, but is there an English dictionary (on line) that shows examples of how to use the
word in a sentence?
Many thanks, Maria
Permalink5
Maria -
Here’s one: http://www.m-w.com/
Permalink6
Eliot -
I have a lesson on Spanish ordinals and fractions here:
http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/vocabulary/ordinalnumbers.html
Permalink7
The words ‘racecar,’
‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read left to right or right to
left.
There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous.” Tremendous,
horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
There are two words in the English language that have
all five vowels in order. Abstemious and facetious.
“Typewriter” is the longest word that
can be made by using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
Permalink8
Laura,
that is an excellent lesson. In a tangential topic, I read somewhere that Spanish, as spoken in
Spain has 34 phonems while English, as spoken in the USA, has 44. Can you tell us something
about this?
Permalink9
This week (23 February) on NPR radio, “Car Talk”
asked what plural word in English has none of the letters of its singular, which itself is a
commonly used word. Warning: Click & Clack said that the sought plural is, perhaps,
archaic. Also, one of the two words here has few letters.