According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the longest English word of one syllable is the ten-letter scraunched, appearing in a 1620 translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote. It is a largely obsolete form of scrunched or crunched. The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is generally regarded as the most comprehensive, accurate, and scholarly dictionary of the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... Events September 6 - English emigrants on the Mayflower depart from Plymouth, England for the future New England and arrive at the end of the year. ... Cervantes can refer to: Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, 16th-century man of letters Cervantes, Ilocos Sur, a municipality in the Philippines Cervantes, a town in Western Australia Cervantes de Leon, a character in the Soul Calibur series of fighting games This is a... Don Quixote de la Mancha (now usually spelled Don Quijote by Spanish-speakers; Don Quixote is an archaic spelling) (IPA: ) or El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha) is a novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. ...

The eleven-letter word broughammed (created by analogy with bussed, biked, carted etc.), while readily pronounceable as one syllable in all dialects ("broomed"), is yet to appear in a print dictionary. See: "ough" words. For the purposes of this article, any word which has appeared in a recognised general English dictionary published in the 20th century or later is considered a candidate. ...

The 10-letter word "squirreled" is arguably monosyllabic.

There are a number of nine-letter words of a single syllable. Unsurprisingly, most of these long words contain one or more digraphs (e.g., rr or ai) and the occasional trigraph (e.g., tch). That is, multiple letters are used to represent a single sound. Additionally, neither the -ed preterite past tense ending for verbs, nor the -s plural ending for nouns increases the syllable count for words, so it is unsurprising that the longest words would use these endings. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... A trigraph (from the Greek words tria = three and grapho = write) is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound. ... In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ... This article is about the grammatical term. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in)definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. ...

Note, however, that in early Modern English, the -ed ending was frequently pronounced with a /ə/ (schwa) or /ɪ/ or /ɛ/, resulting in another syllable. Even today, the e is pronounced as a schwa in some dialects, resulting in an increased syllable count. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ...

Aside from the -ed pronunciation issue, scraunched's claim is further weakened by the fact that English spelling was largely unstandardized throughout the early Modern English period until the advent of modern dictionaries. 1620 is well within the early Modern English period. English spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts and contains many inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation, necessitating rote learning for anyone learning to read or write English. ... A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. ...

List of nine-letter English words of a single syllable:

• broughams
• craunched
• quarreled
• schlepped
• scratched
• scraughed
• screeched
• scrinched
• scritched
• scrooched
• scrounged
• scrunched
• sprainged
• spreathed
• squelched
• straights
• strengths
• stretched
• throughed
• thrutched

Note that strengths manages to have only one vowel letter. It is also one of the most complex syllables in English, its consonants and vowels being distributed as CCCVCCCC (/strɛŋkθs/, although it can be pronounced /strɛŋθs/). Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Finally, one can consider the use of an apostrophe as an extension to the word length. Under this assumption, nouns using the plural -s can be modified to use the singular possessive case ending -'s or the plural possessive -s', resulting in a marginally longer word. However, in some dialects, this adds a second syllable and disqualifies the word. An apostrophe An apostrophe (French, from the Greek αποστροφος προσωδια, the accent of elision) ( ’ ) is a punctuation and sometimes diacritic mark in languages written in the Latin alphabet. ... Possessive case is a case that exists in some languages used for possession. ...

List of nine-letter English words, plus apostrophe, of a single syllable:

• brougham's and broughams'
• straight's and straights'
• strength's and strengths'

See also

• Longest word in English

There are seemingly endless debates over which is the longest word in English, demonstrating that the idea of what constitutes a word is not as straightforward as it seems. ...

External links

• askoxford.com: What is the longest one-syllable English word?
• rec-puzzles.org: What words have an exceptional number of letters per syllable?