Last Words on "Last Words"

Always room for debate!

The “Last Words” feature I did last week brought a couple of interesting responses I wanted to share. Since I usually monopolize this channel, I figured this time I'd let them get…the last words.

From Eric Chaikin:

Nice update, TC. 

Sadly, your eminently reasonable standards prevent inclusion of some more exotic possibilities, including boxer Bobby CZYZ (pronounced “Chazz”), a Polish word for a small finch. Words derived from it include CZYZYNY Castle, likely the “last C-word”, um, so to speak.

Alas, we also miss out on the melatonin-based sleep aid EZ-ZZZ (“Easy Z’s”). 

Czech offers the famed vowelless verb form VZTVRKLS (“you got stubborn”)

One upgrade which does meet your criteria is TZURIS - aka Yiddish agita - with an infamous number of spellings acceptable in Scrabble, including this one.

Keep the good work coming.

And from Darryl Francis:

Hey T,

Below are a few more Last Words. But many of these can be bettered further still once you start to allow foreign personal names and foreign placenames.

fyve, an old spelling of five, appears in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It appears in 268 quotations in the OED, the most recent being one from 1783. That's slightly more up-to-date than the Anglo-Saxon fyrdung.

pzazz, a variant of pizazz, is in the OED, and has been a valid Scrabble word in both the US and UK for years.

rywhell is an old spelling of rule, also in the OED - marked as 'late Middle English'.

Tzutuhiles are members of an Indian people of the south shore of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala - in the online unabridged Merriam-Webster.

uzzard is in the OED as an old name for the letter Z, the same as izzard.

vyzard is in the OED as a variant of vizard, a mask or visor.

wywere in the OED is a fishpond, a variant of viver.

yzyenne, in the OED, is a past tense of the archaic verb ysee, to see.

And, finally, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz appears in an OED quote at the letter Z! The quote: "Once you have hit on a commercial product you just go on producing more of the same, over and..zzzz..over and..zzzz..over and..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."

I know that most of these are either obsolete or foreign, but I think you start to run into problems if you shut out words earlier than certain dates (when?) or personal names and placenames from certain geographical areas (which?).

Tomorrow: Crosswords 1917!