Learn English – Are you supposed to use capitalized letters when expanding an all-caps initialism in parentheses to explain what each initial respectively stands for

OK, well another Friday, another Perl script. Here’s this week’s:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my @alphas;
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    my @words = split /\s+/;
    foreach my $word (@words) {
        $word =~ s/[^A-Za-z]//g;
        next unless $word =~ /^[A-Za-z]{2,}$/;
        $word = uc $word;
        my @letters = split //, $word;
        my $sorted_word = join '', sort @letters;
        if ($sorted_word eq $word) {
            push @{$alphas[length $word]}, $word;
        }
    }
}

for (1..2) {
    print join "\n", @{pop @alphas};
    print "\n=====\n";

}

This time I used as the input corpus the AGID word list from Kevin’s Word Lists:

And got this output:

AEGILOPS
=====
BILLOWY
DIKKOPS
=====

Aegilops (length 8) is a genus of grasses, and so is proper noun and might not count. Billowy (length 7) is definitely a commonly-used, legit word. Dikkops (length 7), also known as Stone-curlews, are a South African bird.

There seem to be three spellings: timezone, time-zone, and time zone.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines time-zone,[^1] but curiously, also uses the time zone spelling.[^2] At the same time, timezone is the favored spelling in the US (unless talking about multiple time zones).[^3]

All three seem to be equally correct, but I would use time zone, except for a singular usage in the US for an American audience, in which case I would use timezone. Personally, I feel time-zone is a bit outdated.

[^1]: See time, def. 60a [^2]: Ibid. 27a [^3]: See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timezone