The Unigram Puzzle
Solution

Of course, unigram itself is a unigram, but it's just a nonce word, so we won't let that count. Still, it's easy to realize that say, investor is an 8 letter unigram, so now we're on the board. Then realize that adversion gets us to 9, and epistolary to 10, and it doesn't seem like we're really near the limit yet.

For a second stab, I'll just think of a few longer words, such as the panvowels, and I can see that of them, we can write down

so without thinking too hard, we've hit 14 letters already!

Now, it's not too hard to write a program, like unigram.f90, which will read all the words in a list and print out the ones that are unigrams. The program comes up with a fair number of words of 13 letters:

At least one of these words seems like a misspelling, and the better half of them look like they'd make sense to Julius Caesar!

There are even some 14 letter words, including the panvowel we stumbled across earlier:

And happily, at least with our list of words, there is just one winner, at 15 letters:

Last revised on 18 April 2003.