• Mood: curious
• Music: ahhh, that would be telling

Polysyllabic

Today I have had definite reason to count the number of syllables appearing in each of 284 not-randomly-selected LJ usernames. There is a reason for this which hopefully I will be able to explain later; while I do do some pretty strange things for fun, this is not one of them. The way I pronounced the names (assuming silent underscores) the results are as follows:

1 syllable: 4
2 syllables: 33
3 syllables: 93
4 syllables: 100
5 syllables: 36
6 syllables: 16
7 syllables: 2
(mean 4.0105 X3.658 SHOW YOUR WORKING NEXT TIME, median 4, mode 4)

...and I thought jiggery_pokery was a bit of a mouthful.

The question this rises is: do you know anyone who habitually uses a LJ username with more than 7 syllables, with the condition that it must be naturally pronounced as a name rather than as a collection of initials? Names which include single-letter syllables are fine, so long as you wouldn't naturally introduce pauses between them - for instance, I would argue that owlman is clearly pronounced s (pause) j (pause) branford but that leiabelle is clearly pronounced lei a belle. (lnr is the exception in having a collection of initials which is pronounced as a name, but that's deliberate.)

I suppose that wwwwwwwwwwwwwww would have either fifteen or forty-five syllables and that 777777777777777 would have either thirty syllables if you pronounce each digit separately, sixty-one if you pronounce the number the British way or fifty-six if you pronounce it the American way without "and"s. I dare say you could beat it easily by finding a digit with three syllables when pronounced in some other language, too. I'm looking for real-world examples of polysyllabic LJ usernames, though.