It’s not only geography that makes a place unique. It can also be an unusual array of letters forming its name, for example what I featured awhile ago on Place Name Palindromes.
I traveled down a several-hours tangent recently in search of heterogram place names. Those are words where each letter of the alphabet appears only once. “Utah” would demonstrate that principle. U, T, A and H are all used a single time without any repetition. However, I’d call that a particularly lame occurrence — just four letters — used simply for illustrative purposes. Go ahead and start thinking of longer ones while I set the stage.
Let’s begin with some definitions
A pangram is a sentence or phrase that uses every letter of the alphabet. Repeats are allowable but fewer repetitions are more impressive. Many people learning to type start with a pangram: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” A perfect pangram uses all 26 letters only once. Perfect pangrams in English don’t even look like English. “Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz” is an example. There may be pangram place names if one considers ridiculous layers of government: Francis Quarles Story Neighborhood Historic District, City of Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona, United States of America picks up some of the more difficult letters but even that one doesn’t get all 26.
An isogram doesn’t have to use every letter, but the letters it does use have to occur the same number of times. The word “noon” serves as a very simple example. Here, the N and O each appear twice. Some would call that a second-order isogram. A heterogram is a first-order isogram. Each letter appears only once. If a single word with twenty-six different letters existed in some alternate universe, it would be the longest possible heterogram and first-order isogram. It would also be a perfect pangram. Got all that?
The Search Begins
So then I went in search of heterogram place names. The best I could do on my own was Spaulding, a town of about six-hundred people outside of Springfield, Illinois. It features nine different letters with no repetitions.
Then I proved to myself once again that I have no original ideas. I turned to the search engines and learned that others have already mined this concept with considerably better results. I discovered “Colloquy” from the May 1, 2003 edition of Word Ways. I’ll steal examples from that definitive source from here-on-out. One should refer to the article to see citations for people who should get all of the credit for finding particular instances.
Word Way gave greater credence to place names that were included within the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s GEOnet Names Server (GNS) database. That seemed reasonable. I tried to check on some of the others and I’m not convinced they would qualify as meaningful places.
Malitzschkendorf
Malitzschkendorf (sixteen letters) in Germany may be the longest heterogram place name. It’s listed in the GNS database but even this one barely appears on any online map. The more accepted spelling is Malitschkendorf, reducing it to fifteen letters. That’s still quite remarkable.
Gumpoldskirchen
Apparently only one other place name heterogram with fifteen letters exists in the GNS database: Gumpoldskirchen, a town in Austria. This one at least appears on most maps (for example). It has 3,500 residents and is noted for its vineyards.
Bricklehampton
The longest English-language heterogram place name is believed to be Bricklehampton, a village in Worcestershire, England. It contains fourteen different letters. The Guardian featured Bricklehampton in a 2007 article, What’s so special about Bricklehampton?:
“The interesting question is: which is the longest isogrammatic place-name in English? Eventually, I found it – a small village in Worcestershire called Bricklehampton. Its 14 letters make it the longest such name in the language. Maybe there’s a place in the middle of Canada or Australia that beats Brickle-hampton, but I haven’t yet found it.”
I’d love to see any original pangrams, isograms or heterograms not already listed on the Intertubes. Can the 12MC audience rise to the challenge? Can anyone find that elusive place in the middle of Canada or Australia (or elsewhere)?
Leave a Reply