The Dream Comes True
Back in 1995, I was VP of Strategic Marketing at Open Text, which at the time was 25-person SGML indexing company. The company had initially built itself on a single lead project in the late ’80s: Indexing the Oxford English Dictionary. Doing a full-text index of such a massive work was considered impossible. Who could dream of indexing tens of thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words? But under the technical direction of Tim Bray, breakthroughs were made and full-text retrieval took an important step forward.
Fifteen years later, Tim Bray and Open Text have moved onto other challenges. But only now has the fruit of that original effort paid off in full. Yes, the latest issue of WordWays, the oddest journal on the planet, announces that computer-aided searches of the OED have found 523 of the 625 vowel tetragrams. A vowel tetragram, in the words of Susan Thorpe of Great Missenden, England, the author of the article, is “a group of 4 vowels unbroken by consonants.” She suggests that AQUEOUS, QUEUE, ONOMATOPOEIA, COOEE, HAWAIIAN and SEQUOIA “are perhaps the most familiar.” For example, I recently found myself saying, “The aqueous Hawaiian and great sequoia stood in a queue to ask, in onomatopoeia, what the hell a cooee is.”
Thorpe has unearthed other familiar words such as EEEEVE (the iiwi bird), BEOUIEN (tremble), IUAEIN (to hate), OUOUO (no stinting), UIUIA (type of beer), PLOIIER (ply), and MEAOUSTE (see Miaotse). If you know of words that contain UIII, OIIU, OOOU, AAAO, AUUU and about 100 others, Susan wants to hear from you.
Ah, yes, it’s the kind of day that makes your hard work figuring out how to use B-trees to encode arbitrary SGML data seem all worthwhile…
Is she any relation to the mysteriously named Octo Thorpe?
Referring to the letters AEIOU as vowels is misleading, there are about 16 vowel sounds in English, and they often use multiple letters to represent them. ‘Queue’ has only one vowel in it. Coo-ee has two, though they are extended.
I do hope you made a phonetic index too.
Don’t tell Thorpe there are 16 vowels! She’ll be up all night finding the 1,678,252 possible combinations.
(Note: I made that number up.)
Only 4 vowels? :-) In Dutch we have words like “papegaaieeieren” (parrot eggs). It gets more interesting with strings of consonants, though… consider “angstschreeuw” (cry of fear) or “slechtstschrijvend” (worst-writing).
Of course, hardly anybody uses these words, but they *are* valid. ^_^