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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the longest English word of one syllable is the ten-letter scraunched, appearing in a 1620 translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote. It is a largely obsolete form of scrunched or crunched. The eleven-letter word broughammed (created by analogy with bussed, biked, carted etc.), while readily pronounceable as one syllable in all dialects ("broomed"), is yet to appear in a print dictionary. See: "ough" words. The 10-letter word "squirreled" is arguably monosyllabic. There are a number of nine-letter words of a single syllable. Unsurprisingly, most of these long words contain one or more digraphs (e.g., rr or ai) and the occasional trigraph (e.g., tch). That is, multiple letters are used to represent a single sound. Additionally, neither the -ed preterite past tense ending for verbs, nor the -s plural ending for nouns increases the syllable count for words, so it is unsurprising that the longest words would use these endings. However, the final -ed ending WILL INCREASE the syllable count if the verb base ends in a /t/ or /d/ sound: divide becomes divided (two syllables become three) and create (two syllables become three) or in a one-syllable word such as rent (rented the one syllable becomes two). Note, however, that in early Modern English, the -ed ending was frequently pronounced with a (schwa) or or , resulting in another syllable. Even today, the e is pronounced as a schwa in some dialects, resulting in an increased syllable count. Aside from the -ed pronunciation issue, scrauncheds claim is further weakened by the fact that English spelling was largely unstandardized throughout the early Modern English period until the advent of modern dictionaries. 1620 is well within the early Modern English period. List of nine-letter English words of a single syllable: Note that strengths manages to have only one vowel letter. It is also one of the most complex syllables in English, its consonants and vowels being distributed as CCCVCCCC (, although it can be pronounced ). Finally, one can consider the use of an apostrophe as an extension to the word length. Under this assumption, nouns using the plural -s can be modified to use the singular possessive case ending -'s or the plural possessive -s, resulting in a marginally longer word. However, in some dialects, this adds a second syllable and disqualifies the word. List of nine-letter English words, plus apostrophe, of a single syllable:
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