banana
punctuation
filigree
graffiti
titular
boondoggle
representative
look
pool
room
marmalade
geostasis

...everything looks interesting now !

spoon
palpate
sportsl

illigitimate
assassinate

ignoble
narcissistic
atavistic
coterminous
arrogation
Yog-Sothoth
fabulous

Yog-Sothoth

careful…

buckety

«illigitimate»

Illegitimate—not quite as bad when you remove one of the i’s.

In English only

diminishing

Mississippi

syzygy

imminent

swimming

balaclava

horror-romance

Milli Vanilli (not sure if “through no fault of their own” applies here)

Bananarama (ditto)

Lananeeneenoonoo (intentionally ditto!)

In other languages

tagetage Danish (‘top floor/garret’ – interesting because you read it as tage-tage, but it’s actually tag-etage)

ffwndwr Welsh (‘commotion’)

ffwr-bwt Welsh (‘without warning’)

dŵr dwfn Welsh (‘deep water’)

actually just pretty much everything in Welsh

töllöttää Finnish (‘look around a bit’)

… and pretty much everything else in Finnish, too, especially on this page

oiseau French (‘bird’)

Angstschweiß German (‘anxiety sweat’)

jäääär Estonian (‘edge of the ice’)

töööö Estonian (‘night of work’)

Råå (river in Sweden), hence rååål Danish/Swedish (‘eel from the Råå river’) (before 1948, this was written as raaaaaal in Danish)

Most of those are ‘interesting’ in print more because they contain such very odd combinations (or repetitions) of letters than because of the shape of the individual letters, of course.

Frobozz Electric, Double Fanucci, and of course, the infamous Xyzzy!
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

Helvetica

heavyweight
keyword
polyvinvyl
goggles

beijing

Obama (the answer is always Obama)

Cheers, Si

Suggested by the thread title, and probably more interesting (or rather disgusting) to consider than to see in print: Oceans of Lotions. There was a store with this name.

I dare some writer here to make a story out of all these words. What a hoot it would be.

Dan, go to bed. You are just getting squirrelly.

créée (French feminine version of "created")

bookkeeper
rhythm
unnecessary
aioli
teepee
minimum
oology
Hawaiian
huh
Ohio
suss
Qabalah
onomatopoeia

At the risk of sending this looping in the wrong direction, I think phlegm looks like a funny word.

commaaccent

I love typing that, even though I don't have to, when I'm generating glyphs.

Welsh for sure. They have caps in the middle of words.

Any word can look funny if you look at it long enough, even your name. My first and last names have a lot of repeating characters, tried to make a logo out of that once but it didn't look good.

perfidy
illicit
kreplach
accommodate
callipygian

…Oceans of Lotions…

Dammit Carl, I was just reading about Caligula and then you had to go and put Oceans of Lotions into my head. BLEAH!

vicissitude
Viridian
floor

monopod
alfalfa
Tennessee
fuddy-duddy
pop
Nietzschean
chichi
coccyx

asinine
waffle

Welsh for sure. They have caps in the middle of words.

What, like OpenType? :)

But seriously, I don't recall seeing capital letters in the middle of words when I was growing up in Wales, but I may have simply missed this aspect of the orthography. Can you give me some examples, Patricia?

Aiaia

Sometimes spelled as Aeaea. The name of Circe's island in Homer's Odyssey.

A lot of words in the 1969 Marshallese orthography looked really weird -- actually, they first looked like encoding errors to this non-reader -- because the ampersand was used as a vowel:

Yi'yaqey y&q! Yij yetal gan Hay&l&gļapļap. (Hello! I'm going to Ailinglaplap.)

Actually, 'Ailinglaplap' is a pretty fun word even without the ampersands.

In a more recent orthographic reform the ampersand was replaced by ę, presumably under the slogan 'Ogoneks. Not just for Poles.'

Oceans of Lotions. There was a store with this name.

Presumably they went out of business as a casualty of the new airline security cabin luggage restrictions that the Guardian diary referred to as 'The War on Hand-Cream'.

supercalafragilisticexpialadotious

parterretrap

or:
parterreserretrap

«But seriously, I don’t recall seeing capital letters in the middle of words when I was growing up in Wales, but I may have simply missed this aspect of the orthography. Can you give me some examples, Patricia?»

I think she might possibly be mixing up one Celtic language with another (well, two others): in both Irish and Scottish, when initial consonants are eclipsed, only the original consonant is capitalised, not the eclipsing consonant.

So, for example, bróg ‘shoe’, dlí ‘law’, grá ‘love’, poll ‘hole’, teach ‘house’, and cill ‘church’, if eclipsed and capitalised, would be written thus:

a mBróga ‘their shoes’
a nDlíthe ‘their laws’
i nGrá ‘in love’
i bPoll ‘in a hole’
i dTigh ‘in(side) a house’
i gCill ‘in a church’

Even if written in all-caps, it should still be A mBRÓGA, A nDLÍTHE, &c.

I can’t think of any instance in Welsh where a similar situation would arise, either. Eclipses (or soft lenitions, or whatever you call them in Welsh—Welsh initial mutations confuse me a bit) are, to my knowledge, capitalised normally in Welsh, on the rare occasion that they result in multiple letters. I have a song called Yng Ngolau Ddydd, for instance; not Yng nGolau Ddydd.

revving
anywhere

redivider
WAVY
LAVA
Oshkosh

in Swedish: lyxvillor
in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen

It might have been Gaelic, not Welsh, where I saw those words with caps in the middle.

Also Turkish always looks like anagrams to me.

lyxvillor

this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters.

A turkish poem. To my western eyes, this language looks soooo strange. Like the Scrabble board before you have started putting the letters into words.

Ben giderim adım kalır
Dostlar beni hatırlasın
Düğün olur bayram gelir
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Can kafeste durmaz uçar
Dünya bir han konan
Ay dolanır yıllar geçer
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Can bedenden ayrılacak
Tütmez baca yanmaz ocak
Selam olsun kucak kucak
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Açar solar türlü çiçek
Kimler gülmüş kim gülecek
Murat yalan ölüm gerçekh
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Gün ikindi akşam olur
Gör ki başa neler gelir
Veysel gider adı kalır
Dostlar beni hatırlasın

Oceans of Lotions is the best!!

Hot Pants & Coelacanths

Ill.
tchotchke
Ho-Ho-Kus

sexes

I like the x in the middle and the s as bookends. I want to see the last e and s as a mirror image of the first though.

Yes palindromes are nice, I already gave 2 Dutch ones.

What about a palindrome in a phrase like:
"Live not on evil."

Or a very long one from an old Donald Duck magazine (in Dutch):

"Koos Eekfeen keek door 't rood kerkraam maar krek door 't rood keek neef Kees ook."

:)

lyxvillor
this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters.

Yes, indeed it is. What makes it even worse is the combination "ill" that follows, which tends to be relatively compact.

Froggy :-P

ChrisL

Actually, Mili should chime in with all those Finnish words with a bazillion double umlauted glyphs.

I also hate strings of i with diacritics all bashed together. I don't know what real words would have such things though and hope they are rare.

ChrisL

Cock-a-doodle-do

Patty, that's enough Scrabulous for you!

Great palindrome:

T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a
name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.

Pizza.

I think it's fascinating that that is one of the first words that children learn to recognize.

I did a logo once for a company called Sahara and loved playing with the type. I think Honolulu is fun to type and say. And I went to High School in Tullahoma, Tennessee. All are places. It seems that places have more funky fun names than other things.

I was born in Quesnel.

«in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen»

My German is quite bad, so I might well be wrong, but hasn’t the new(est) spelling reform done away with all those (except Schneeeule and Teeei)? I thought I’d read somewhere that in the new orthography, triple consonants were always reduced to double consonants.

There is of course always the lovely Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which, quite apart from being ridiculously long, contains -(b)wllllan- with no less than four l’s in a row. And then goes on to end in -ogogogoch, which, in combo-Scandinavian, would mean ‘andandandand’.

Cauaiauaia (place in Angola) looks odd, too.