Today's Three-L Lamas (Lllamas?)

Wheee!

In Word Ways #2.4, Faith W. Eckler discussed the challenges of finding a three-letter concatenation. “As Ogden Nash points out, one does not expect to encounter English words containing LLL—or, for that matter, EEE or SSS.” She found this phenomenon most likely to exist in words with suffixes attached. Two examples she cited were WALLLESS (having no walls) and HEADMISTRESSSHIP.

However, technological tools have advanced since Eckler’s piece, so I thought it was worth taking a fresh look at triple-letter incidences. Using OneLook as my chief source, I hunted for such, excluding cases where the root word is just one letter, as in AAA batteries or XXX movies.

My chief finding? Triple-letter words…haven’t changed that much since Eckler’s 1960s study. The most common ones in dictionaries now are, once again, HEADMISTRESSSHIP (narrowly eclipsing MISTRESSSHIP) and WALLLESS (though WALL-LESS gets twice as many entries). And most letters just don’t have any triple incidences at all.

If you loosen the restrictions, you can have a bit more fun. A few nonverbal utterances have variant spellings that include three letters in a row, including shhh, hmmm, and bzzzt…wrong!

Allowing ourselves hyphens and multi-word phrases, as Eckler did not, we open up the game. Some of the most common for certain letters are add-drop periods, odd ducks, free enterprise, bee-eater, snuff film, egg glass, still life, shoo off, and the Hawaii Islands (and Islanders).

For J, the best result is jazz musician J.J. Johnson. Freddie Foxxx is a rapper. Walther Hermann Nernst codified the third law of thermodynamics. Scott Turow is a famous author of legal novels.

Wiktionary recognizes “Amerikkka” as a legitimate word when deriding the racist and/or fascist elements within the U.S. Riot grrrl also has a political meaning, standing at the intersection of modern feminism and punk. Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya is an Egyptian Islamist movement that the U.S. took off its list of terrorist organizations two years back. As other groups radicalize, it seems to be calming down.

The Krupp process is a steelmaking thing, the Knapp procedure a surgery. Both are scientific activities, so I guess we’ve got to watch their p-value, eh? Ha!

Looking into b, c, m, q, u, v, w, and y didn’t give me anything I considered rewarding.

Checking the Eckler piece again, I note she obtained some unusual combinations by using IBM punchcards and hunting for the results. She ends her piece with a request for two combinations the punchcards suggested that she didn’t find: words containing CEEER and OSSSH.

A search for CEEER turned up just a couple of obscure acronyms, nothing of note. Excluding some Urban Dictionary bullfeathers, the closest OSSSH came to unhyphenated acceptability was in Kinrossshire and Rossshire, two counties in Scotland. However, the two counties are more commonly hyphenated, and Kinross-shire is now an outdated name besides.

Eckler found the word BOSS-SHIP in her original piece, referring to authoritarian criminality, but discounted it due to its hyphen. I thought it might have evolved into an unhyphenated form in the intervening years. It hasn't!

So, as Eckler herself speculated we might, we have to chalk up those two combos to machine error. Ah, well. It was still a fun avenue to explore!

Next comes a micross, and after that…I’ve got a story about one of the weirdest comics to end up influencing my childhood. Until then!