"Onion" and "salsa" possess a similar structure: both words consist of two identical 2-letter syllables and a distinct letter between them.
Apparently, there are more English words of similar form (12312).
Find as many as you can.

(In reply to re: Solution by ed bottemiller)

Neither digraph nor syllable is correct.

In some dictionaries, the syllables of "onion" is represented as un'y*n (where u = u with breve; and * = schwa); and in some of the other dictionaries as '^n j*n (where ^ = the open-mid back unrounded vowel; j = the IPA palatal N; and * = schwa). In the latter, the "n" doubles for the grapheme for "n" and as part of the digraph of the "ni" in the word "onion". Yet, neither pair of letters of o and n in either syllable are digraphs.

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P.S. I added "teste" to my word list. I don't know how I missed it.  Thanks.

Edited on July 1, 2010, 12:21 pm

Posted by Dej Mar on 2010-06-30 18:32:04