Have you ever heard of Wordsmith?
Wordsmith.org is a worldwide online community of some half-million readers who share a love for words, wordplay, language, and literature. They hail from Australia to Zimbabwe and almost all other places in between.
One of my favourite services that they offer is A.Word.A.Day, which sends you a new word every day by email, along with background information and also a daily quotation. Usually the words for the week are chosen around a theme. This week’s theme was rather cool: words having vowels aeiou once and only once, and in order. Which include the following:
- abstemious
- caesious
- anemious
- facetious
- annelidous
Can you think of any others?
casa azahar 
abstemious (ab-STEE-mee-uhs) adjective
– Sparing, especially in matters of eating and drinking.
[From Latin abstemius, from ab- (from) + temetum (liquor).]
caesious (SEE-zee-uhs) adjective
– Bluish or grayish green.
[From Latin caesius, probably from caelum (sky).]
anemious (uh-NEE-mi-uhs) adjective
– Growing in windy conditions.
[From Greek anemos (wind).]
facetious (fuh-SEE-shus) adjective
– Jocular or humorous, often inappropriately.
[From Latin facetus (witty).]
annelidous (uh-NEL-uh-duhs) adjective
– Of or relating to worms.
[From French anneler (to ring), from Latin anellus, diminutive of anus (ring).]
LikeLike
You bad woman. Now I am going to have this problem circling around in my head ALL DAY.
LikeLike
Well I couldn’t think of any, but being the geek that I am I worked out how to find all of them. I won’t ruin your fun but if you want to know, find a dictionary site that allows you to do a “regular expression” (regex) search and put the following into the search box:
[^aeiou]*a[^aeiou]*e[^aeiou]*i[^aeiou]*o[^aeiou]*u[^aeiou]*
(In case you wanted that explained: [^aeiou]* means the search should match any number of letters that aren’t a, e, i, o or u.)
If you want to know what Webster’s gives you, just click here. I’m going to try this on the complete OED later when I get access to the online version. For now, the only one that stood out as particularly amusing was a hyphenated one:
WATERING-TROUGH
LikeLike
Complete list on my blog for those who are interested. 🙂
LikeLike
Pingback: aeiou « The Samovar
Cheater! 😉
LikeLike
🙂 Well let’s be honest we weren’t going to find any of the ones that you didn’t already list above. Did you know any of those words?
LikeLike
Did I know any of the five original words? Yes of course. Abstemious – which I’m usually not. And facecious – which I often am.
LikeLike
I’m going to assume you weren’t being facetious 😉 and say: Oh no of course not. I meant did you know any of the ones that weren’t in the original five? I’d guess not – I certainly didn’t (although I could guess the meaning of some of them).
LikeLike