[alnwlsn]

A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.

It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.

[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.

[hidroto]

that seems to be in the same vain as this presentation by guy steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 .

[autoexec]

I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.

[alnwlsn]

Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible description for each word.

"day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth" even though that's not technically correct.

"sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have took a chair"

"moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so on.

[roryokane]

I made the “sit” gloss long: “to rest your body on your bum (while your bum is on a thing such as a chair or the ground) while your back is up”.

[mateo411]

I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.

[thom]

Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.

[yunwal]

Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.

Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.

You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.

[ronjakoi]

Single-syllable words can still be pretty long, like "squished" or "scrambled"

[schoen]

I just ran some code over the CMU pronouncing dictionary and the longest words identified as single-syllable that are English-origin and not proper names or possessives were

  9 SCRATCHED
  9 SCREECHED
  9 SCROUNGED
  9 SCRUNCHED
  9 SQUELCHED
  9 STRAIGHTS
  9 STRENGTHS
  9 STRETCHED

For eight letters, it found dozens of examples!

The CMU dictionary thinks that "scrambled" is two syllables as a vowel ends up between the "b" and the "l" in pronunciation. Wiktionary thinks this is a syllabic l (/l̩/), which should probably be counted as a separate syllable even if it isn't considered a vowel.

Wikipedia says

> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as even [ˈiːvn̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈiːvən/).

That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing, perhaps treating /l̩/ as /əl/.

[saltcured]

yeah, "quizzed" (35) is the highest I found