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Let us pause and just play with them now, just to blow off steam, whoop them up and have fun with them –just as word lovers like Richard Lederer, author of Crazy English did.

Aside from the English language’s five most frequently used words (I, the, end, of, to) and the hardest working words (set, which has almost 200 meanings; and run, which follows a close second), other words playfully tease and surprise us because of some special characteristic they attach themselves with.

Did you know that queue is distinct for being the only word that retains its original pronunciation even if all vowels are dropped?  But while queueing contains five vowels in a row, miaoued (variant spelling of meowed) parades all five vowels.  A few words like abstemious have all vowels in order, while some others like subcontinental have theirs in reverse. 

I’ve read somewhere that uncopyrightable is one of the two longest words with no repeated vowels, and cabbaged is unchallenged as the longest word using the musical alphabet.  I’ve yet to see a longer word with only two vowels than latchstrings whose string of six consonants in one word is also the longest; and yet, strengths makes do with but one single vowel.

Can you find a word with four consecutive letters of the alphabet other than overstuffed and understudy? 

Perhaps the longest word in which each letter appears twice is scintillescent, but bookkeeper consists of three double letters in a row.

Ushers didn’t get my attention until somebody pointed out that it contains five personal pronouns in succession – us, she, he, her, and hers!

When perched atop the typewriter or keyboard some words don an aura of uniqueness.  Proprietory must be the longest word from a typewriter’s top row of letters.  It should be polyphony if you type and type properly with the right hand only.

Some words like redivider read the same forward or backward.  Others, like temperamentally (t-em-per-amen-tally) consists of five layers, gain size, one layer at a time, as they rumble along.

Who says the 34-letter supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (atoning for extreme and delicate beauty [while being] highly educable) is the longest word to amble to town?  I came across that word back in grade school.  Then came the 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (a miner’s lung disease caused by the inhalation of silicate or quartz dust).  And yet the name of one chemical compound beats all others in length:  tryptophan synthetase A protein.  Spelled in full, the word has 1,913 letters. 

Then also, some verbivores claim that many words are so unique they should appear in the dictionary, but don’t.  A wordsmith named Richard Hall calls them Sniglets, brand-new words formed with the fusion of pliant, playful syllables.  Examples include teleclearance, the act of clearing one’s throat before answering the telephone; oopsibabble, the two or three sentences you speak to a friend as you walk together through a crowd before discovering a total stranger beside you and your friend five feet behind; wobbliwad, the folded piece of paper put under a piece of furniture or equipment to prevent wobbling; photernity, the time span occurring from the moment you start smiling until the photographer finally takes a picture.

Then there’s mufflebob, a simultaneous tiptoeing and ducking walk one does presumably to be less conspicuous.  One usually employs this when he arrives late for a meeting.

Words are born, mutate, or die. One thing’s certain. Words will always be evolving as long as human race exists.