I’m also not going to recreate the list of logical errors, since others have already done so (see here or here along with some good advice here).

What I do want to do is talk about thw two kinds of logic that are often misinterpreted as doing those two things - inductive and deductive.

Deductive is easiest to talk about so let’s warm up with a quick overview.

Deductive logic is of the type most often found in math classes when talking about “if p, then q; if not-p, then not-q”

The process begins with a few statements, taken as ‘givens’ (certain conditions you can accept as true), called “premises”. You then have to determine what other statements would be true if all of these premises are taken as true. For example:

Premise: All men are mammals.
Premise: Mike is a man.
Deduction: Mike is, therefore, a mammal.

Sometimes, arguers will start at the (to them, self-evident) deduction and skip the premises entirely as unspoken, and they can be challenged on their deduction based on what seems to be faulty premises. (For example, there might be some men who are not mammals, or Mike might not necessarily be a man.)

This is the argument “from the general to the specific”. Be careful when using this to ensure that all of your premises are true, or at least arguably so.

Now, Inductive begins with certain points of fact - verifiable data - and attempts to derive general conclusions from those facts. This is the “from the specific to the general” and is much tougher, because the conclusion may not necessarily follow from the data. For example, it is known that if one parent has cancer, the chances for a child of that pair to get cancer are much higher. But if the child does get cancer, it does not necessarily prove the induction, because some environmental influence may have caused it (exposure to toxins, overexposure to the sun, smoking two packs a day, etc.) rather than the genetic influence.

Deduction and induction are, by themselves, insufficient for a valid scientific approach. While deduction gives absolute certainty, it never interacts with the real world, there is no way to test the validity of the premises. And, while induction is driven by observation, it never approaches the actual level of proof of a Theory. The development of the scientific method involved a gradual blending of these two approaches to logic.

There are also various levels of “fact”. This includes, but is by NO means limited to:

• tradition - something passed down from person to person, and may actually have been written down at one point. But merely writing something down does not speak to the veracity of the data.
• anecdote - a story from one person’s point of view, or one person’s experiences with a phenomenon. Most religious claims are of this type.
• prediction - used frequently when talking about future events based on possibly questionable data. But a prediction is not reliable evidence until the predicted event actually occurs.
• experiment - which also includes polling data. The attempt to actually measure the phenomenon or determine general public opinion.
• statistics - the product of multiple tests and their outcomes, attempting to eliminate extraneous influences. This allows for multiple trials, and is usually expressed as a chance of an event occurring, such as “next week’s weather forecast” or the chance of winning at craps.
• clinical trial - working hard to eliminate all unnecessary influences and randomizing the choices to produce firm, reproducible data.
• Scientific Theory - Theories can be safely used to predict future events to any needed degree of certainty.
• natural physical law - usually expressed as a mathematical or physical definition, such as the operation of gravity or the speed of light

When evaluating the evidence, merely grading it as to “level of reliability” is insufficient. There is also “significance” (the magnitude of the fact as regards the number of people affected by it) and “relevance to the topic”. It may very well be a scientific fact that the speed of light is exactly equal to 299,792,458 meters per second, but it is not a significant fact when discussing National Health Care, nor is it particularly relevant to that topic. So something merely having been identified as a scientific fact does not necessarily end the debate.

So when evaluating evidence in general, you should look at it in several different ways. First, is it a single datum being used to indicate a trend or a trend used to predict a specific outcome? Second, how reliable is the evidence (which also include the credibility of the one presenting the evidence)? Third, is it actually significant to the topic? And finally, is the evidence actually relevant to the topic being discussed?

The Stasis of Conjecture is whether or not a thing exists, or whether an event occurred. Definition is how that thing or event should be referred to or defined as. Quality is usually presented as a justification or excuse. And Stasis of Place is a special case that usually preempts the debate, but I’ll cover that in greater detail in just a moment.

The examples that he gave were fairly clear, and define the stasis by how the response to an assertion is phrased. The original assertion in each of the examples will be exactly the same, but the stasis is defined by how what kind of response is given to the original assertion, that of being approached by someone in the street, who then asserts, “You stole my car!”

The stasis of conjecture - whether or not I actually stole the car - would be defined by responded, “I couldn’t have possibly have stolen your car because I never had your car.” In essence, I would be defining the stasis by saying the act never actually took place.

The stasis of definition - whether or not the act could be defined as “theft” - would be defined by responding, “I didn’t steal your car, I only borrowed it.” However, by using this, I am implicitly conceding the stasis of conjecture (whether or not I ever had the car in the first place).

The stasis of quality - whether the act made for a better outcome - would be defined by responding, “Yes, I took your car, and it’s a good thing that I did because this lady was walking along your sidewalk and tripped and broke her hip and if I hadn’t taken your car to get her to the hospital, she would have sued you, and so it’s a better outcome for all concerned.” However, I would be implicitly conceding both the stasis of conjecture, as well as that of definition (I did have the car, and I did take it without permission). As I pointed out, this is most often expressed as a justification or excuse.

The stasis of place is, as I pointed out above, a preemptive response, and is simply asserting that the accuser and accused are not in the right place to be making the assertion or a response. In our example, the accusation would be, “You stole my car!”, and the response defining stasis of place would be something along the lines of, “That’s a very serious charge, but this isn’t the place for such things. I’ll see you in court!”. This doesn’t concede any of the previous stases, but once the accuser and accused are in the right place, this can no longer be used to adequately define the debate, and one of the other three must be used.

The exception to that preemptive stasis would be debates about policy, because there is no real “right” place to discuss this, and policy debates are just as likely to occur in classrooms and cocktail parties as they are in legislatures and law offices.

I’ll be getting into more detail as to how these points of conflict should be best applied to issues being publicly debated today in later issues, but in the meantime, I’d love your input…

2.  Even if there were enough troops at the beginning, there weren’t enough to keep the peace.

Oooohh, this part I like as well.  It is usually spoken by the same people that will also quote Point #3, and we’ll address it.  In the city of Los Angeles, there are approximately 9,200 policemen, and they made over 134,000 arrests.  9,200 policemen, 134,000 arrests, and a population of around 4,000,000.  Iraq has 26,000,000 people, and we have had over 115,000 US troops there since the invasion was over.  That would put the soldier-per-population number at one per 226 or so, right?  In LA, it’s one police officer to 434 residents.  There have been more civilians murdered in LA since 2003 (2,632) than were killed in 17 of 18 regions in Iraq during the same time frame, that one outlying province being Baghdad.  Numbers of ‘police’ or ‘safety forces’ are straw-man arguments from the beginning.

But let’s get away from comparisons that can be debated back and forth.  Here’s a point...what does one do with the extra soldiers?  Where are they housed?  And, more importantly, with an enemy that is schooled in both media manipulation and blending into the general public, how does a larger force deal with them without either simply providing the enemy with more media-directed IED attacks or giving enemy snipers more targets, and hence more Internet video opportunities? 

You might debate the need to train Iraqi police and army, but the US is doing just that, having trained over 300,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen.  And since the Iraqis do over 75% of the security patrols in Iraq, why would we need more US Soldiers sitting around over there?  We need enough to support the ‘surge’, back up the Iraqis, and prosecute the War on Terror by killing al Qaeda and other insurgents when we meet them.  130,000 troops are sufficient for that, 500,000 would be far too many, and 50,000 wouldn’t be enough.

3.  What about the Reserves!  They are getting stretched too thin!

But you want more troops than what we have now?  If we couldn’t field 500,000 at the beginning of the war, how does one expect not to be using our reserve forces in this?  However, we are not debating numbers at this point, because everyone’s an expert. 

About the Reserves...they are doing a great job.  And they have put in their time.  Are they stretched?  Sure...post-Vietnam deployments always call up reserve forces.  It is based on laws passed by representatives in Congress to increase the political cost of participating in foreign conflicts.  The power of the POTUS to fight protracted conflicts overseas was checked by the Congress in this manner.  Therefore, in order to put together a strong fighting force, GWB was forced to call up Reserve and Guard components.....and is forced to still.  If he were to cycle these men and women out, readiness would fall quickly. 

Hence this newfound concern for the ‘condition’ of reserve units, mostly spoken at press conferences by liberal Democrats.  Since these units are now required to complete a military force engaged in a conflict, deeming them as ‘unready’, either in training or on material, discounts them from service or puts the POTUS in the position of sending them anyways.  It can be anything from ‘armor lacking on vehicles’ to ‘lack of proper ammunition’ to purely technical or superficial issues.  The result is that a unit needed in Iraq cannot deploy without an overriding decision by the President.  The anti-war Democrats are not interested in the military readiness of the unit in question.....they are interested in forcing Bush to send them after they are identified as ‘unready for deployment’.  They are hamstringing units already in the field in order to score political points against GWB, and this anti-military grandstanding will force units in Iraq to either decrease in effectiveness, or redeploy out-of-theatre. 

4.  We fought this war wrong all along.  We should have been done by now. 

There are three easy things to remember, friends. 

A:  We fought a war in Iraq designed to save as many civilian lives as possible.  If anyone who has half-a-brain doesn’t think that we could have ended this war in 2 weeks, they need better meds.  If we say that 20,000 Iraqi civilians died (directly because of our war effort) between the day of the invasion and the day we captured Saddam Hussein, that means that less than one in a thousand died.  .08% And that 20,000 number is probably obscenely huge.  If we would have instituted carpet bombing in Baghdad, we could have killed 300,000 in a single day.  And al Qaeda and the Sunni’s would still be there, and the Left would be screaming about genocide and the inhumanity of Bush, and....well...wait....they are doing that anyways. 

B:  Because of Point A, and because of the disaster that the Iraqi infrastructure was before the war, we worked hard to save as much of that as possible.  Since the end of the war, we have worked like hell to rebuild Iraq, and the terrorists (again, hiding within civilian populations and attacking those things that get the most media noise and political fallout) continue to fight our efforts.  This has extended our time there.

C:  This isn’t a war on Iraq.  It is a War on Terror, and there are different facets.  One is the stabilization of the only Muslim democracy in the region.  Second, al Qaeda is there, attacking us, and a lot of reports say that bin Ladin has his fingers in Iraq.  We are also in a position to threaten Iran with force.  Look at a map...who have we surrounded?  Maybe the strategic thinkers weren’t so stupid after all. 

OK...I’m out of time with this at this point.  There will be more later.....but I’ll take your comments for now. 

Acceded, cabbage, baggage, defaced, effaced, and feedbag are seven-letter words which can be played on a musical instrument. Cabbaged is an eight-letter one.

ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC is the longest acronym in the 1965 edition of the Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary. It is a Navy term standing for Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command. Another acronym, PUMCODOXPURSACOMLOPAR, stands for “pulse-modulated coherent Doppler-effect X-band pulse-repetition synthetic-array pulse compression lobe planar array”.

AEGILOPS (alternate spelling of egilops, an ulcer in a part of the eye) is apparently the longest word which consists of letters in alphabetical order. CHILLLOSS (the opposite of a heatloss) has its letters in alphabetical order, although this word may not be in any dictionary. The title of the film EFIK MOVY was written abcdEFghIjKlMnOpqrstuVwxYz to show the alphabetical-order property. BEEFILY and BILLOWY are the longest such words in Official SCRABBLE Player’s Dictionary, 2nd Ed.

Six-letter words with their letters in alphabetical order include: abbess, abhors, accent, accept, access, accost, aders, afflux, almost, begins, bellow, bijoux, biopsy, chilly, chimps, chintz, chippy, chitty, chivvy, choosy, choppy, efflux, effort, floors, floppy, flossy, ghosty, glossy, and knotty.

Bevy not only has its letters in alphabetical order but is also symmetrical in its distribution over the alphabet (that is, B and Y are equidistant from the center; likewise E and V). BY and LO also meet this description.

Asthma and isthmi (alternate plural of isthmus) are perhaps the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels between.

Ague/vague is a two-syllable word which becomes a one-syllable word by adding a letter or letters. Other examples: ague/plague, rugged/shrugged, aged/raged, aged/staged.

Some common words which change from one to three syllables upon the addition of just one letter are: Are/area, came/cameo, crime/crimea, gape/agape, hose/Hosea, Jude/Judea, lien/alien, ole/oleo, rode/rodeo, Rome/Romeo, and smile/simile. There are numerous other examples involving more obscure words.

Some words which change from one to two syllables when letters are removed are: Source/sour, boat/boa, have/ave, cave/ave (etc.), whole/ole, sole/ole (etc.)

‘Anhungry’ is one answer to the question, “What’s the other word besides ‘angry’ and ‘hungry’ that ends in ‘gry’?” This is the most frequently asked question of the editors of Merriam-Webster. Actually, “angry” and “hungry” are the only two words in common use ending in -gry, but quite a few obsolete or obscure words can be found in unabridged dictionaries. Among them are: anhungry (used by Shakespeare), aggry (bead), half-angry, overangry, unangry, ahungry (oppressed with hunger), puggry (a variant form of the more usual PUGGAREE, a scarf wrapped around a sun helmet), an-hungry, begry, conyngry, gry, higry pigry, iggry, meagry, menagry, nangry, podagry, skugry, unangry. [An alternate solution this question is the word “language.” The person actually says, “Think of words ending in -gry. Hungry and angry are 2 of them. There are three words in the english language. What is the third? You use it everyday. If you paid attention I have already told you the answer.” (More on the -gry question can be found at http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/gry.htm and http://www.tempe.gov/library/netsites/gry.htm. )

Beijing has three dotted letters in a row (in lower case). Other words with multiple dotted letters are remijia, bogijiab, pirijiri, kharijite, gaijin, Fiji, Hajji, hijinks, Ujiji (where Stanley found Livingstone in 1871), Ajijic and Pijijiapan (cities in Mexico), jinjili, ijijimò (Nauruan for the adjective “lean,” and Nauruan is a palindrome!), Shijiazhuang (Chinese city). Niijima and Iijima are Japanese last names; Minoru Niijima is the artist who drew the cover graphic for Edward R. Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In Dutch, there are jij (you), pijjekker (pea-jacket), schrooiijzer (upstanding cutting iron for bars or rods), Sjiiet (follower of the Shia), snijijzer (cutting iron), uitdijing (expansion), and zijig (silky). In Lithuanian, jiji is an archaic Lithuanian form of “him” consisting exclusively of dotted letters, and kraujijimas is archaic for “staining with blood”. In Swahili, jiji means “city” and kijiji means a small city or village. A property development company in the Canadian territory of Nunavut is the Katujjijiit Development Corporation, with six consecutive dotted letters.

The earliest known use of ‘catenary’ in English is by President Thomas Jefferson. The earliest known use of ‘mileage’ is by Benjamin Franklin.

‘Catercorner’ has eight spellings in Webster’s Third Edition: catercorner, cater-cornered, catacorner, cata-cornered, catty-corner, catty-cornered, kitty-corner, and kitty-cornered. Another dictionary has cater-corner. Barry Harridge reports that in Chambers the eight spellings of ‘catercorner’ are surpassed by the number of variants for ‘gallabea’ which can also be spelled gallabeah, gallabia, gallabiah, gallabieh, gallabiya, gallabiyah, gallabiyeh, galabea, galabeah, galabia, galabiah, galabieh, galabiya, galabiyah, and galabiyeh. (Friederike E. Droegemueller adds these spellings: Djellabah, Jellaba, Djallabea, Jalaba, Djelaba. She writes, “I saw all of these spellings, and more, in Morocco. It is, by the way, the same garment, regardless of spelling.")

Gloria Donen Sosin says she has found 16 spellings for ‘Hanukkah’ (in alphabetical order): Channuka, Channukah, Chanuka, Chanukah, Chanuko, Hannuka, Hannukah, Hanuka, Hanukah, Hanukkah, Kanukkah, Khannuka, Khannukah, Khanuka, Khanukah, and Khanukkah. (Her list may include transliterations from Hebrew to English.) James A. Landau has found Chanuccah in an 1872 prayer book.

The name Muammar Khadafi has over 30 variants according to the Library of Congress.

The only countries in the world with one syllable names are Chad, France, Greece, and Spain.

‘Chincherinchee’, which the OED’s Second Edition describes as a common variant of chinkerinchee, has one letter occurring once, two letters occurring twice, and three letters occurring three times.

CIMICIC is a long word which consists only of letters which make up Roman numerals. In Latin, there is LIXIVII (the genitive of LIXIVIUM). A list of words of four or more letters consisting only of letters used in Roman numerals follows: CIMICIC (a yellow oil), CIMICID (an insect), CIVIC, CIVIL, CIXIID (one of the Cixiidae, a family of insects of order Homoptera), DILL, DILLI (a bag or basket also called dilly bag), IDIC (pertaining to or consisting of ids), ILICIC, IMID (variant spelling of imide), IMIDIC (related to an imide), IMMI (unit of measure formerly used in Switzerland = 1.5 l), IMMIX, IXIL (Mayan tribe in central Guatemala), LILL, LIVID, MIDI, MILD, MILL, MIMI (heroine of the opera La Boheme), CLIM (dialectic past tense of climb), MIMIC, VILI (a brother of Odin in Norse mythology), VILL, VILLI (plural of villus), VIVID. MIX is the only English word that is also a valid number in Roman numerals. Among words consisting only of Roman numeral letters, the “highest scoring” Roman numeral words in English (e.g. MerCy = 1100) are MIMIC (2,102) and IMMIX (2,012). If U is allowed in Roman numeral words, there are ILLUVIUM, DILUVIUM (a coarse glacial deposit), MILLILUX (1/1000th of a lux), ILLICIUM (a genus of evergreen trees), and CULICID (mosquito family) [Philip Bennett, Rick Shepherd].

‘Conservationalists/conversationalists’ (18 letters) is the longest non-scientific transposal (words which are anagrams of each other), according to Guinness. Another transposal is ‘internationalism/interlaminations’ (16 letters). The longest “well-mixed” transposals (no more than three consecutive letters in common) are ‘basiparachromatin/marsipobranchiata’ (17 letters) and ‘thermonastically/hematocrystallin’ (16 letters). The longest three-way well-mixed transposal is ‘interrogatives/reinvestigator/tergiversation’ (14 letters). The longest “perfectly mixed” transposals (no consecutive letter combinations) are ‘nitromagnesite/regimentations’ and ‘rotundifoliate/titanofluoride’ (14 letters).

‘Cwm’ (a glacial hollow on a hillside) has the rare W as a vowel, as does ‘crwth’ (a type of stringed instrument). Both words are in MWCD10. They are pronounced “koom” and “krooth” (rhyming with room and truth). Other such words are ‘twp’ (stupid), ‘awdl’ (an ode written in the strict alliterative meters), and ‘Llwchwr’ (a city-district in Wales). (All of these words are of Welsh origin.)

‘Dabchick’ (a small bird) is among the very few words that contain ‘ABC’. Some others: abcoulomb, abchalazal, abcaree, crabcake, and drabcloth. Allowing intervening punctuation, there is sab-cat (a saboteur). Proper nouns include Babcock, Abcoude (city in the Netherlands), and Zabcikville (city in Texas). There are also abchasica, abchasicum, and abchasicus, all three of which are botanical names for Paeonia Plants found in the Caucasus.

‘Deeded’, ‘geggee’ (the victim of a hoax) and ‘sestettes’ have each of their letters appearing three times.

‘Dord’ is a non-existent word entered into the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary by mistake. The following is taken from The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics by Herbert C. Morton (1994):

When the guidelines for etymology in Webster’s Third were nearing completion, Gove took time out to add the story of dord to the lore of how things can go wrong in dictionary making. Dord was a word that had appeared spontaneously and had found a quiet niche in the English language two decades earlier. It was recorded in Webster’s Second in 1934 on page 771, where it remained undetected for five years. It disappeared from the dictionary a year later without ever having entered common parlance. The facts, which had been established years earlier through a search of company files, were as follows, as abridged from Gove’s explanation.

The lack of an etymology for dord, meaning “density,” was noted by an editor on February 28, 1939, when he was perusing the dictionary. Startled by the omission, he went to the files to track down what had happened and what needed to be done. There, he found, first, a three-by-five white slip that had been sent to the company by a consultant in chemistry on July 31, 1931, bearing the notation “D or d, cont/ density.” It was intended to be the basis for entering an additional abbreviation at the letter D in the next edition. The notation “cont,” short for “continued,” was to alert the typist to the fact that there would be several such entries for abbreviations at D.

A change in the organization of the dictionary possibly added to the confusion that followed. For the 1934 edition, all abbreviations were to be assembled in a separate “Abbreviations” section at the back of the book; in the previous edition words and abbreviations appeared together in a single alphabetical listing (which is how they again appeared in the Third Edition.) But after the original slip was typed for editorial handling, it was misdirected. Eventually, it came to be treated with the words rather than with the abbreviations.

The editorial stylist who received the first typed version should have marked “or” to be set in italics to indicate that the letters were abbreviations (D or d). But instead, she drew a continuous wavy line underneath to signify that “D or d” should be set in boldface in the manner of an entry word, and a label was added, “Physics & Chem.” Since entry words were to be typed with a space between letters, the editorial stylist may have inferred that the typist had intended to write d o r d; the mysterious “cont” was ignored.

These errors should have been caught when the word was retyped on a different color slip for the printer, but they were not. The stylist who received this version crossed out the “cont” and added the part-of-speech label n for noun.

“As soon as someone else entered the pronunciation,” Gove wrote, “dord was given the slap on the back that sent breath into its being. Whether the etymologist ever got a chance to stifle it, there is no evidence. It simply has no etymology. Thereafter, only a proofreader had final opportunity at the word, but as the proof passed under his scrutiny he was at the moment not so alert and suspicious as usual.”

The last slip in the file—added in 1939—was marked “plate change imperative/urgent.” The entry was deleted, and the space was closed up by lengthening the entry that followed. In 1940 bound books began appearing without the ghost word but with a new abbreviation. In the list of meanings for the abbreviation “D or d” appeared the phrase “density, Physics.”

Probably too bad, Gove added, “for why shouldn’t dord mean density?”

A footnote indicates the excerpt above was based on Philip Gove, “The History of Dord,” American Speech, 29 (1954): 136-8.

Some non-existent places are Goblu and Beatosu, which appeared as towns on the 1979-80 Michigan State Highway Commission map; they actually represented Go Blue! and Beat OSU, and were deleted from the 1980-81 map.

DREAMT is the only common word in English ending in -MT. Others are the obscure adreamt, redreamt, undreamt, or daydreamt.

‘Earthling’ is first found in print in 1593. Another surprisingly old word is ‘spaceship’ from 1894. MS. (used instead of Miss or Mrs.) has been found in 1949.

Some words consisting only of short letters are overnumerousnesses (18), overnervousnesses (17), curvaceousnesses (16), erroneousnesses, nonconcurrences, and verrucosenesses (all 15 letters), while lighttight and lillypilly (10 letters) are the longest words consisting of only long letters. Some nine-letter words are flightily, highlight, and hillbilly, and gyp and gyppy consist only of letters with descenders. Words with only “up” letters are ‘tittifill’, tikitiki, libidibi, dikdik, titbit, and tidbit.

Eight is the first number, if all numbers are arranged in alphabetical order; zero would be the last number.

‘Escalator’ is one of many words that were originally trademarks but have become ordinary words found in dictionaries. Some other words which were originally trademarks (or still are) are: Aqua-lung, Aspirin, Autoharp, Bakelite, Band-Aid, Breathalyzer, Cellophane, Cornflakes, Cube Steak, Dacron, Deepfreeze, Dictaphone, Ditto, Dry Ice, Dumpster, Formica, Frisbee, Granola, Gunk, Heroin, Jeep, Jell-O, Kerosene, Kleenex, Lanolin, Mace, Mimeograph, Moxie, Novocain, Nylon, Pablum, Phillips Screw, Ping-Pong, Popsicle, Q-Tip, Rollerblade, Scotch tape, Sheetrock, Stetson hat, Styrofoam, Tabloid, Tarmac, Thermos, Trampoline, Vaseline, Velcro, Windbreaker, Yo-Yo, Zipper.

‘ETAOIN SHRDLU’ is defined in Webster’s Third Edition as “a combination of letters set by running a finger down the first and then the second left-hand vertical banks of six keys of a Linotype machine to produce a temporary marking slug not intended to appear in the final printing.” The word comes from the layout of the keys on a Linotype machine. The letters also correspond exactly to the sequence of most frequently used letters found in English writing. That is, “e” is the most frequently occurring letter, followed by “t,” etc., according to one study.

‘Ewe’ and ‘you’ are pronounced exactly the same, yet share no letters in common. Another example: ‘eye’/’I’, ‘oh’/’eau’ (de cologne), ‘a’/’eh’, ‘awe’/’or’ (Australian pronunciation).

‘Fabaceae’ (a family of beans in some classifications) is the longest word which can also be a hexadecimal numeral (consisting only of A, B, C, D, E, and F). Other hexadecimal words are acceded, bedface (a word used in the building industry), defaced, and effaced. ‘Deadbeef’ in hex is often used in computers to mark an invalid number or address. DEADBEEF is the name of an attack on a public-key cryptographic protocol, consisting of publishing a key with the same key ID as a previously existing key. In PGP and GPG, the key ID is the last few digits of one of its numbers in hex. To demonstrate this attack, someone created a key ending in 0xdeadbeef, so it is called a dead-beef attack. The hex code “DEADC0DE” (including a zero) also coded as “0xdeadc0de” (0x meaning hex) is sometimes used in programming.

‘Fickleheaded’ and ‘fiddledeedee’ may be the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet. Others may be ‘illeffaceable’ and ‘cabbageheaded’, although these words may not appear in dictionaries. ‘Higglehaggled’ and ‘gibblegabbled’ are in Charles Bombaugh’s Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, ed. Martin Gardner. The Rec Puzzle Archives gives ‘hamamelidaceae’. Some shorter words are ‘backfield’, ‘backfilled’, ‘blackballed’, ‘blackjacked’, ‘blackmailed’, ‘decalcified’, ‘feedback’, ‘flimflammed’, ‘immedicable’, ‘macadamia’, and ‘hijacked’ (which also has HIJ appear in order.

‘Forty’ is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. ‘First’ (which is an ordinal number) shares this property. ‘One’ is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.

In German, EINS and ACHT are the only numbers with their letters in alphabetical order.

‘Four’ has four letters; no other number has this property in English such that the number of letters in the name equals the number. Examples in other languages include:

Afar KONOY
Basque BEDERATZI (9)
Catalan U
Chinese (standard Mandarin) I, ER, SAN, SHIH
Czech TRI
Danish TO, TRE, FIRE
Diola KUGNEN LI SIBAKI (14)
Douala MUTOBA
Dutch VIER
Esperanto DU, TRI, KVAR
Estonian NELI
Ewondo ZAMGBAL
Finnish VIISI
German VIER
Hungarian NÉGY
Irish (Gaelic) DÓ, TRÍ
Italian TRE
Japanese NI, SAN
Khmer PRAIM BEI (8)
Lingala ZOMI NA MIBALE’ (12)
Lithuanian DU, PENKI, SEPTYNI
Malgache ENINA AMBIN’NY FOLO (16)
Maori KOTAHI TEKAU MA ONO (16)
Norwegian TO, TRE, FIRE
Portuguese CINCO
Romanian CINCI
Sango BALE’-OKO NA USE’ (12)
Slovak TRI
Soninke’ TANMU-DO-FILLO (12)
Spanish CINCO
Swedish TRE, FYRA
Tagalog APAT, LABING-DALAWA (12; also spelled LABINDALAWA)
Turkish DÖRT
Welsh TRI, CHWECH (see note)
Wolof FUKK AK JUROOM BENN (16)
Zoulou AMASHUMI AMABILI NA MBILI (22)

For the above list, according to Phil Couch the Welsh word for six “may contain six typed characters but it has only 4 letters. Welsh (more properly Cymraeg) has double character letters CH, DD, FF, NG, LL, PH, RH and TH.”

In Lithuanian the accusative case of ASTUONI (eight) is ASTUONIS (8 letters).