Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

Comments

The answer is

[ConanG]

Devertebrated

Link to the original article next time!

Re:Misleading summary

[svnt]

This is such an obvious blog spam by this guy that it is painful.

Both blog entries (one completely redundant to mask the referrals), are authored by "Moe Zilla" (painfully lame pseudonym, btw) whose "ultimate goal is to earn money online while writing about whatever I want," and whose writing style has the exact same defects as those in the summary.

Give up dude, your high school English teach was right: you suck.

Re:Misleading summary

[blake182]

The longest word isn't found in the 'a much better answer' link, but rather the other one, somewhat misleadingly. The word, in case you're interested, is supposed to be 'devertebrated', though the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't recognise it.

~$ uname -rs
Darwin 9.5.1
~$ grep "^[asdfgqwertzxcvb]\{13,\}$" /usr/share/dict/words
aftercataract
devertebrated
tesseradecade

Someone with an OED can feel free to check them.

dereverberated

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Removing reverberation from a soundtrack, also called echo removal.