The words "carioca" and "orator" exhibit a similar pattern: both words consist of two identical groups of letters and another group of letters between them.
Let’s look for more English words of similar structure (MNM - each group should consist of 2 or more letters).
Plurals and proper names not allowed.

What is the longest word fitting my description ?

This program finds all such words that are within my word list, with a length greater than or equal to 16:

OPEN "\words\words.txt" FOR INPUT AS #1
DO
  LINE INPUT #1, w$
  ln = LEN(w$)
  IF ln >= 6 THEN
    FOR l = 2 TO (ln - 1) / 2
     IF LEFT$(w$, l) = RIGHT$(w$, l) THEN
      IF ln >= 16 THEN
       PRINT w$; " "
      END IF
     END IF
    NEXT
  END IF
LOOP UNTIL EOF(1)
CLOSE

The words found are:

antiauthoritarian
antihumanitarian
antitotalitarian
deoxyribonucleotide
phonocardiograph

The 19-letter deoxyribonucleotide is the longest found.

In each of these words, the repeated M portion is only two letters.

By reducing the total word size to 14, we can get some 3-character M-repeats:

anticonvulsant
antidepressant
antiperspirant
phytogeography

With a 13-letter word, we can get the M section to contain 5 characters:

undergrounder

 

Posted by Charlie on 2010-10-29 17:47:21