by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 06, 2008   Last Updated: February 08, 2009

"Aegilops" is the longest English word spelled in alphabetical order, though the longest word that you've actually heard of is probably "almost". (Aegilops is a rare word describing an obscure kind of oat grass, and in medicine it's also a specific kind of sore that forms in the corner of an eye.) Aegilops is the dictionary's answer to the question, but it's not a word used in every day speech. Among commonly-used words, there's "almost", "biopsy" and "chintz".

And this mystery leads in more strange directions. A simple computer program can crunch through all the words in an online dictionary and identify every single word with this rare all-aphabetical pattern of letters. I was determined to get a definitive answer to this question, so I took a minute to write out the computer code and take a look at the results. Surprisingly, it revealed that there's 13 other six-letter words which are just as long as the word almost. Unfortunately, most of the words it found were even more obscure!

abdest acknow adipsy agnosy befist behint beknow bijoux dehors dehort deinos dimpsy ghosty

I was disappointed that the computer program was identifying lots of words in alphabetical order - but most of them were words that I'd never heard of! It even found one 7-leter word with its letters in alphabetical order - egilops - but looking it up in the dictionary returned just one two-word definition:

"See aegilops."

Surprisingly, there's a whopping 57 different five-letter words with their letters in alphabetical order. Most of these words are equally obscure, but here are a few of the more familiar ones.

abhor adopt adept befit begin below bijou chips deity dirty empty filmy first ghost

And it's also possible to generate a few more alphabetical five-letter words by adding an "s" to many of the four-letter words matching the criteria.

chins chips chops films

Statistics seem to suggest that randomly-assigned letter combinations would appear in alphabetical order for out of every 32 words, but unfortunately, real words use very few of the possible letter combinations. (After all, abcdefgh isn't a word!) Instead, real words usually correspond to sounds that are easy for humans to pronounce, so it's surprisingly difficult to find words that meet the criteria.

So if anyone asks you for the longest, all-alphabetical words, your best answers are:

Almost, chintz, biopsy, and aegilops

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