[seqfan] Re: Trivial array of powers

[israel at math.ubc.ca]

The only words acceptable for Scrabble that have a letter repeated 3 or 
more times, according to the word list 
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/twl06.txt, are "brrr" and "zzz". 
English tends to break up words that would otherwise have a letter repeated 
three times using a hyphen or space, e.g. "full-length" and 
"mass-spectrometry". German, on the other hand, has lots of examples, e.g. 
"Abfalllager" and "Zooorchester".


Cheers,
Robert

On Dec 9 2015, Frank Adams-Watters wrote:

>This is, of course, what I was hinting at.
>
> As for the linguistics, there are any number of English exclamations that 
> can have a letter repeated 3 (or more) times to represent a prolongation 
> of the sound: eeek, shhh, hmmm, arggg, yesss, nooo, oooh, etc. I don't 
> know of any English words with 3 consecutive letters the same that does 
> not fit this pattern.
>
> I would also cite the story "The Nine Billion Names of God", by Arthur C. 
> Clarke, where one of the restrictions on the names of God is that no 
> letter appears 3 times in a row.
>
>Franklin T. Adams-Watters