Nov. 13th, 2025

miriam_e: from my drawing MoonGirl (Default)
There is a humorous quip:
I would tell you the only word in the English language that has all the vowels in order, but that would be facetious.

I decided to check it against the "words" list most linuxes have, with this simple sed command:
sed  -n '/[aA][a-z]*e[a-z]*i[a-z]*o[a-z]*u/p' /usr/share/dict/words | wc -w
It turns out there are at least 183 words that contain all the vowels in alphabetic order, though only 20 if no repeats of vowels are allowed:
sed -n '/^[^aeiou]*a[^aeiou]*e[^aeiou]*i[^aeiou]*o[^aeiou]*u[^aeiou]*$/p'
abstemious
abstemiously
abstentious
acheilous
acheirous
acleistous
affectious
annelidous
arsenious
arterious
bacterious
caesious
facetious
facetiously
fracedinous
half-serious
half-seriously
majestious
trade discount

(I can't take credit for the second regex pattern. ChatGPT gave me that after I fiddled for a little while at it. Obvious in hindsight, dammit!)

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miriam_e: from my drawing MoonGirl (Default)
miriam_e

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