As usual, I was reading an article somewhat above my pay grade last week and found a piece that dealt with the English alphabet. The column dived into the dictionary in an unusual way. I had no idea that such words and uses could exist. The mental ride was worth it, and I will share some of it.

Let’s start with the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary: pneumonoultramicrocopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The word describes a miner’s disease caused by inhaling too much quartz or silicate dust. Well, we probably will never hear it, and we sure hope that we don’t.

The longest word in common use is counterrevolutionaries. Again, not something we hope for.

Some of the other things to learn about words we have heard of: The shortest word in the dictionary without a vowel is NTH, as in nth degree. ASSESSES is the shortest word in which a letter appears five times. FACETIOUS is the shortest word that contains all five major vowels in alphabetical order. (Sometimes people include y as a vowel.) SEQUOIA is the shortest common word to have all five vowels. STRENGTHS is the longest word containing but one vowel.

Then we have words that have many letters but could be spelled with quite a few less: enemy (NME), essay (SA), excellency (XLNC). I guess the smart people call these examples grammagrams.

BLOSSOM is a seven-letter noun and verb with a double letter in the middle. Pluck out the double letter, and you get BLOOM. Again, that word has a double letter in the middle, and the two words mean the same thing. We who have the Midwest accent pronounce the longest word with one syllable: SQUIRRELED.

My favorite is a palindrome, which is a word or phrase that reads the same forward and backward. Remember the phrase “Madam, I’m Adam.” Forward or backward, it’s the same greeting. Another is redivider, which holds the title of the longest common word in this category. My granddaughters’ favorite is taco cat.

I never knew that there was a classification called onomatopoeic interjections. These include recognized words such as grrr, psst, shhh or tsk tsk. Then there is a term called “beheadment,” where the first letter is removed, forming another, but appropriate, other word: PIRATE becomes IRATE, and PRESIDENTIALLY turns into RESIDENTIALLY. QUEUE is the only word that can have its last four letters removed and still retain the same pronunciation.

Here is one to give your grandchild. Tell him or her that you have all these toothpicks and the game is to make the longest word with only the straight line of the toothpick. NINE is the first, and TWENTY is the second, but put the two together and you can get TWENTY-NINE. O, R and S ruin a bunch of competitors. Did you know that the word TYPEWRITER can be typed using only one line of letters on a keyboard?

It gets even crazier. Take the word USHER. In that word, one can find five personal pronouns. US, SHE, HE, HER and HERS. You didn’t know an usher could be useful in so many ways.

Another word to add to the column is ambigrams. These are words that can be written upside down. NOON, SWIMS, SOLOS, suns, pod, and mow. Some must be in noncapital letters to work. Unfortunately, or perfectly, mom doesn’t work, but maybe it does in a different way. She becomes wow!

Then comes the game of snowballing a word. This means taking a word and cutting it into many words. The example that was used is TEMPERAMENTALLY. Some of the words do not seem to meet the criterion of being in the dictionary, but in fact, they all are. T EM PER AMEN TALLY. See if you can come up with some. If not, try PLAINCLOTHESMEN. PLAIN CLOT HE’S ME N. Yep, all in the dictionary.

Another area of interest is called heteronymic pairs. These are two words spelled the same but pronounced totally differently. Tear as in rip and tear as in drops from sad eyes. Another is unionized. One pronunciation suggests the presence of a labor union. But another means that the substance is not ionized.

Let’s use one more cleavage of a word. Let’s say a boy and a girl are AMIABLE TOGETHER. If division is used, he may ponder, AM I ABLE TO GET HER?

A total thanks to this incredible column written by a Mensan named Richard Lederer. I could not have come up with 5% of these without him. I could use EWE from my farm boy days as both a palindrome and as a word that can be spelled with the matchsticks. Enjoy. More serious things to come.

· Dennis Marek can be reached at llamalaw23@gmail.com.