omegapsical

Dan337 commented on the word omegapsical

I was contemplating “coining” this word, but I don’t know what the proper ending should be. Knowing that I couldn’t be the first with the idea, I Googled some variants.

There are (at this time) only two hits for “omegapsic”; both lead to the same post by Dr. Ewart Shaw (dated 1999-06-04) in rec.puzzles, so this is actually only one occurrence. (Dr. Shaw defines “omegapsic” as the “opposite of ‘alphabetic’”.)

There are “about” 1,270 hits for “omegapsical”, but most (about 1,225) refer to a series of comic book torrents titled “The More than Complete DC in Omegapsical Order”. Filtering out the word “MTCDC” and phrase “More than Complete DC” still yields 46 nicely diverse hits; most appear to be discussions about (or claiming to have coined) the word “omegapsical”.* (It’s defined on Wiktionary’s “List of protologisms” as “Reverse alphabetical order”.)

One of these defines “omegapsical” as “anti-alphabetical”.)

These are not, however, the only possibilities. Were there a noun form, it would be, I suppose, “omegapsi”, by (approximate) analogy to “alpabet”. To the best of my knowledge, “omegapsiac”, “omegapsial” or “omegapsine” would be just as reasonable. More outlandish options include “omegapsescent”, “omegapsesque”, “omegapsiacious”, “omegapsial”, “omegapsian”, “omegapsiant”, “omegapsiary”, “omegapsiate”, “omegapsible”, “omegapsicious”, “omegapsient”, “omegapsiescent”, “omegapsiesque”, “omegapsiferous”, “omegapsific”, “omegapsiific”, “omegapsiist”, “omegapsile”, “omegapsine”, “omegapsioid”, “omegapsiose”, “omegapsiotic”, “omegapsious”, “omegapsist”, “omegapsive”, “omegapsoid”, “omegapsotic”, or simply “omegapsi” (the noun used as an adjective). I admit to being slightly fond of the completely absurd “omegapsionic”, or better yet, “omegapsionical”.

My personal preference is “omegapsical”, by analogy with “alpabetical” (“according to the sequence of the letters of the alphabet”) as opposed to “alpabetic” (“of or relating to an alphabet”). Is that linguistically or etymologically sound? Does anyone know of a rule for (or even an example of) converting a Greek-derived noun ending with “i” to an adjective?

* At least one of these refers to or is derived from the previously-mentioned torrent. One can whittle it down to 40 results by filtering out “DC”, but as “DC” is an omegapsical sequence and might therefor appear in a relevant discussion, I hesitate to do so.

January 25, 2011

Dan337 commented on the word omegapsical

I know of only five bona fide English words that end with “-psical”: “autopsical”, “harpsical”, “dropsical”, and the dubious derived forms “nondropsical” and “undropsical”. There are at least 111 words that end with “-sical”.

January 25, 2011