Words whose letters are in alphabetical order

    What is the longest word in English whose letters are in alphabetical order? The answer seems to be seven letters or, at a stretch, eight. Only two such words showed up in the Advanced Learners Dictionary, beefily and billowy, but several more turned up in the Summer Institute of Linguistics list of 250,000 words. They are

    adelops

    animals whose feet are not visible

    alloquy

    act of speaking to another (as against soliloquy)

    beefily

    in a beefy fashion

    begorry

    variant of begorra, Irish expletive rarely heard

    billowy

    characterised by billows

    egilops

    (1) An ulcer of the eye; (2) a kind of grass

    The last of these exists in an alternative spelling of aegilops, so there is the only eight-letter word.

    Apart from spoonfeed (which might be disallowed, since many dictionaries give it only as a hyphenated word spoon-feed), there are also no words longer than seven letters whose letters are in reverse alphabetical order. Among the seven-letter words, most are past tenses, such as

    sniffed

    spiffed

    sponged

    wronged

    but there are also these oddities:

    troolie

    a palm tree

    tsoneca

    Patagonian tribe and its language