The Artistic Onomastic Games (1 of 2)

Wordplay Olympic winners.

Sandor “Sandy” Weisz’s Mystery League Instagram ran a special set of wordplay-related awards for the Olympic competitors! With Weisz’s kind permission, I’m reproducing them here. I’ll include his notes and a few observations of my own…

Felix Oschmautz and Fergus Hamilton both have fourteen-letter names with no repeating letters, making them isograms. This is a very rare phenomenon. In a list of 10,000 Hollywood stars, the only isogram of similar length that I found was Kathryn Bigelow, as I noted here.

Alejandra Zavala Vazquez and Matteo Della Valle both contain nine-letter palindrome strings. Formidable, and I hadn’t really thought to look into palindromic substrings, only full palindromes and reversals. I don’t have some of my colleagues’ gifts for programming, but there are a few online resources that are helpful in this regard. Something to look into at a later point in time…

Anni-Linnea Alanen has a higher “letter efficiency” than anyone in my list of celebs, so she’s quite a find. I’d point out that her letter bank is ALIEN, but I don’t want to get any conspiracy theorists going…

Liam Jegou and Zhou Lafei are the two nine-letter Olympians whose names are supervocalics—containing all five of the “pure” vowels. That’s a tricky feat even for dictionary words, much less proper names—the shortest supervocalic, sequoia, is only two letters shorter, and most cited examples are as long or longer.

More tomorrow, and see Sandor’s Mystery League, a group of game designers with similar sensibilities!