1. What is the longest English word that can be formed using the letters A to M?

2. What is the longest English word that can be formed using the letters N to Z?

Notes:

(a) It is not necessary to use all the letters within the specified range. A given letter can occur more than once within a word.

(b) Words involving proper nouns, acronyms or abbreviations is not permissible.

(c) None of the generated words can be hyphenated. For example, words like A-bomb, X-Ray etc. are not allowed.

(In reply to re: solution by broll)

Fiddle-dee-dee may be a valid spelling of the interjection, but only fiddle-de-dee, fiddlededee, and fiddledeedee were found in the online dictionaries.
Both Collin's English Dictionary and the Random House Dictionary provide the latter three spellings, with the online versions of Webster's New World College Dictionary and Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) only providing fiddledeedee as the headword (the WNWCD notes the word as both a noun and interjection).  Fiddle-dee-dee may have missed the eyes of the lexicographers as an alternative spelling, as the word may have been spelled that way in Gone With the Wind (at least an online Google search agrees with you that the word was, and is also the title or part of the title of many children's books).  Of course, Lewis Carrol might have claimed that the word is not an English word, at least his character Alice made that claim:
          'She's all right again now,' said the Red Queen. 'Do you 
  know Languages? What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?'
          'Fiddle-de-dee's not English,' Alice replied gravely.

But then, it is because of author's like Carrol is why it has become an English word. 

A Googling does reveal another alternative spelling: fiddle dee dee, which introduces a question that should be clarified with an answer. Are open compound words to be excluded in the same manner as hyphenated words?

Volume 7 of the "Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention",  Volume 4 of the "New York Weekly Review", and a few other books use a verb form of the word as fiddle-dee-deed. Several blogs use the variant fiddledeedeed, thus one might argue that the alternative spelling fiddledeedeed coud be a 13-letter solution for longest word with letters appearing in only the first half of the alphabet.

 

Edited on March 6, 2012, 8:44 am

Posted by Dej Mar on 2012-03-05 22:45:36