oodles of poodles

[John Hudson]

Aiaia

Sometimes spelled as Aeaea. The name of Circe's island in Homer's Odyssey.

A lot of words in the 1969 Marshallese orthography looked really weird -- actually, they first looked like encoding errors to this non-reader -- because the ampersand was used as a vowel:

Yi'yaqey y&q! Yij yetal gan Hay&l&gļapļap. (Hello! I'm going to Ailinglaplap.)

Actually, 'Ailinglaplap' is a pretty fun word even without the ampersands.

In a more recent orthographic reform the ampersand was replaced by ę, presumably under the slogan 'Ogoneks. Not just for Poles.'

[John Hudson]

Oceans of Lotions. There was a store with this name.

Presumably they went out of business as a casualty of the new airline security cabin luggage restrictions that the Guardian diary referred to as 'The War on Hand-Cream'.

[Hiroshige]

supercalafragilisticexpialadotious

[ThoTh]

parterretrap

or:
parterreserretrap

[Oisín]

«But seriously, I don’t recall seeing capital letters in the middle of words when I was growing up in Wales, but I may have simply missed this aspect of the orthography. Can you give me some examples, Patricia?»

I think she might possibly be mixing up one Celtic language with another (well, two others): in both Irish and Scottish, when initial consonants are eclipsed, only the original consonant is capitalised, not the eclipsing consonant.

So, for example, bróg ‘shoe’, dlí ‘law’, grá ‘love’, poll ‘hole’, teach ‘house’, and cill ‘church’, if eclipsed and capitalised, would be written thus:

a mBróga ‘their shoes’
a nDlíthe ‘their laws’
i nGrá ‘in love’
i bPoll ‘in a hole’
i dTigh ‘in(side) a house’
i gCill ‘in a church’

Even if written in all-caps, it should still be A mBRÓGA, A nDLÍTHE, &c.

I can’t think of any instance in Welsh where a similar situation would arise, either. Eclipses (or soft lenitions, or whatever you call them in Welsh—Welsh initial mutations confuse me a bit) are, to my knowledge, capitalised normally in Welsh, on the rare occasion that they result in multiple letters. I have a song called Yng Ngolau Ddydd, for instance; not Yng nGolau Ddydd.

[Jackie Frant]

revving
anywhere

[eliason]

redivider
WAVY
LAVA
Oshkosh

[Tim Ahrens]

in Swedish: lyxvillor
in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen

[pattyfab]

It might have been Gaelic, not Welsh, where I saw those words with caps in the middle.

Also Turkish always looks like anagrams to me.

[paul d hunt]

lyxvillor

this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters.

[pattyfab]

A turkish poem. To my western eyes, this language looks soooo strange. Like the Scrabble board before you have started putting the letters into words.

Ben giderim adım kalır
Dostlar beni hatırlasın
Düğün olur bayram gelir
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Can kafeste durmaz uçar
Dünya bir han konan
Ay dolanır yıllar geçer
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Can bedenden ayrılacak
Tütmez baca yanmaz ocak
Selam olsun kucak kucak
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Açar solar türlü çiçek
Kimler gülmüş kim gülecek
Murat yalan ölüm gerçekh
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Gün ikindi akşam olur
Gör ki başa neler gelir
Veysel gider adı kalır
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

[HaleyFiege]

Oceans of Lotions is the best!!

Hot Pants & Coelacanths

[eliason]

Ill.
tchotchke
Ho-Ho-Kus

[teaberry]

sexes

I like the x in the middle and the s as bookends. I want to see the last e and s as a mirror image of the first though.

[ThoTh]

Yes palindromes are nice, I already gave 2 Dutch ones.

What about a palindrome in a phrase like:
"Live not on evil."

Or a very long one from an old Donald Duck magazine (in Dutch):

"Koos Eekfeen keek door 't rood kerkraam maar krek door 't rood keek neef Kees ook."

:)

[Tim Ahrens]

lyxvillor
this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters.

Yes, indeed it is. What makes it even worse is the combination "ill" that follows, which tends to be relatively compact.

[dezcom]

Froggy :-P

ChrisL

[dezcom]

Actually, Mili should chime in with all those Finnish words with a bazillion double umlauted glyphs.

I also hate strings of i with diacritics all bashed together. I don't know what real words would have such things though and hope they are rare.

ChrisL

[Sharon Van Lieu]

Cock-a-doodle-do

[Kristina Drake]

Patty, that's enough Scrabulous for you!

[John Hudson]

Great palindrome:

T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a
name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.

[Jonathan Clede]

Pizza.

I think it's fascinating that that is one of the first words that children learn to recognize.

[BlueStreak]

I did a logo once for a company called Sahara and loved playing with the type. I think Honolulu is fun to type and say. And I went to High School in Tullahoma, Tennessee. All are places. It seems that places have more funky fun names than other things.

[HaleyFiege]

I was born in Quesnel.

[Oisín]

«in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen»

My German is quite bad, so I might well be wrong, but hasn’t the new(est) spelling reform done away with all those (except Schneeeule and Teeei)? I thought I’d read somewhere that in the new orthography, triple consonants were always reduced to double consonants.

 

There is of course always the lovely Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which, quite apart from being ridiculously long, contains -(b)wllllan- with no less than four l’s in a row. And then goes on to end in -ogogogoch, which, in combo-Scandinavian, would mean ‘andandandand’.

Cauaiauaia (place in Angola) looks odd, too.