Talk:Three-letter vowel-less English word

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I thought cwm was Welsh -- Tarquin 21:07 Mar 28, 2003 (UTC)

"Cwm" is a Welsh word. I've taken it out. The English people I know can't even say it. Sorry and all that. Deb 11:25 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

English has many words that were borrowed from other languages without changing the spelling. If you remove it from this article, you'll also have to remove it from the article on pangrams in which it is useful in forming two of the sentences. According to List of strange words in the English language, it is pronounced "koom" (easy enough for me to say it). GUllman 18:06 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

But how many of those pangrams actually make any sense to the average English speaker? Have you ever heard an English speaker use the word "cwm"? I doubt it. And how do you pronounce "koom"? Do you pronounce the "oo" as in "zoom" or as in "book"? (I'm not telling you which is correct.) Deb 18:14 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Cwm is certainly an English word now taken from Welsh. It is not however a vowelless word. It is also not apparently the only word using w as a vowel in English http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/v/vowelless.html

Rmhermen 18:30 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Have you ever heard anyone use the word "vowelless"? (Unless you were in a discussion with other students in an English class.) Only a few thousand of the words in a dictionary are in common use; the rest are more technical and used only by certain people in certain situations. For example, only a person in the mathematics field would have a habit of using the word "nth" in conversation. GUllman 21:15 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Not true. I hear people in the UK use the word "nth" all the time. Deb 20:55 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

Seconded. People often say "to the nth degree" for example. -- Tarquin 20:58 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that "nth" is a word any more than "45_th" or "21_st" are words. They are numbers with suffixes. Similarly, "Five thousand, four hundred, seventy nine" isn't a word either. It's merely a string of words. "N" is a mathematical idea or a variable. To refer to the "nth" something is to suffix 'th' or 'st' onto a verbalized variable name which isn't a word to begin with.

"To the nth degree" is a common phrase. Kingturtle 06:29, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Commonly used vowelless word

I added the longest commonly used vowelless word to the article (it's rhythms). I wrote commonly used in place of what I actually meant, which is recognizable. You'd have a hard time finding someone who knew what a symphysy is, but just about everyone knows what rhythms are, without having to ever use it in their lifetime. However, describing it as the longest recognizable word in the article seems wrong. If anyone can think of a better way of putting it, feel free to change it. JeffyP 15:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Twyndyllyngs

Twyndyllyngs was added as the longest word without a traditional vowel. See Longest_word_in_English JeffyP 15:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

This word doesn't appear to be in the OED. While I'm aware this doesn't exclude it from being an English word, it means that a definition here would be useful. Perhaps you can do the Wiktionary page at the same time? Twyndyllyngs Lukehounsome 09:54. 12 Sept 2006 (UTC)

If twyndyllyngs is removed, we should probably restore the sentence that it replaced:

The longest English word that does not contain any of the five traditional vowels is probably the eight-letter symphysy, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means "Union or fusion of two bodies or parts of a body".

—Bkell (talk) 04:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pwn

Pwn. That is all. --Ihope127 13:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

While correcting typos & filling in missing words in pwn section, I checked to see if the word actually exists or if this is vandalism. It exists in an online slang dictionary, which itself could have been vandalized. Because of that possibility, I did some further checking with offline resources and yes, it's a slang neologism commonly used by online multiplayer environment gamers. -- Lisasmall 01:21, 26 August 2006 (UTC)