Learn English – the plural form of “zero”

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.

Where the plural occurs in the citations in the OED, it is ostriches. However, those who make ostrich the plural can appeal to the precedent of the hunter’s plural in lion, tiger, elephant and so on.