Words containing letters in alphabetical order

My daughter Rama asked me this question the other day - which is the longest word that contains all letters in alphabetical order? For a dyed-in-the-wool UNIX hacker like me, the answer was quite straightforward:

grep -i "a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j*k*l*m*n*o*p*q*r*s*t*u*v*w*x*y*z*" /usr/share/dict/words

Interestingly enough, I had left out the "*" at the end of the regular expression so all the words I found were ones ending in "z". That taught me a new word - "chintz" which interestingly enough originates from Hindi and is a type of cotton fabric. My daughter alerted me to my bug when she pointed out that the word "fix" did not appear in my output. I was able to correct my error and rerun the program. One of the longest words fulfilling the requirements of the problem was "biopsy".

Many of my posts may seem like nice ways to kill time but these skills really come handy in ones day-to-day work - for example, in my role as manager I was able to put my skills to good use in order to figure out the productivity of my (Research) group. But that will be another posting for some other day.

- Rajendra Gokhale