English words with four CONSONANTS!!! in the coda

[Particles the Greek]

I can only think of /teksts/ and /jinkst/. Are there any more?

[Salmoneus]

Mistake in subject line...


...and /lENkTs/. Also probably /lENkTd/, although that likely won't be in the dictionary (etc with prefixes - I think I have actually seen/heard /aUtleNkTd/ in real life). Similarly /strENkTs/, /strENkTd/ etc. There also a bunch that occur in poetry but nowhere else, from the the -est personal ending with the schwa elided. Arguable "amongst", depending on how you view that cluster: for me it's at least definitely phonetically [@mVNkst/, but phonemically it's probably only three consonants there - are you counting phonetic, or only phonemic? [In which case, how can you tell that the /k/ in 'jinxed' is phonemic? There are no coda /Nks/ vs /Ns/ minimal pairs, so far as I know.] "Angst"?

[Bristel]

I can only think of /teksts/ and /jinkst/. Are there any more?

/jinkst/? What is that "yinxed"?

[Pabappa]

He presumably meant "jinxed". "Lengths" and "strengths" work if you have one of those dialects (don't most of us?) where an epenthetic /k/ is added between the /N/ and /T/. If you include foreign words, borschts qualifies, and it's possible to argue even for five, if you pronounce it /borStSs/, but the -tSs at the end wouldnt fit the pattern for native English words so it would be a "wrong" pronunciation. Pushing even further you could analyze syllabic consonants as allophones of simple consonants, and go for six. "Borschtschs'll do fine for the main course, thank you."

[zompist]

thirsts, wursts, firsts.. (in rhotic dialects)
adjuncts
infarcts

[2+3 clusivity]

I guess depending on how you analyze reduced vowels, a more liberal view might be:

<Strengthened> [sʈɻɛŋkθnd] ~ [sʈɻɛŋgðnd] and other agglutinated forms. Though, I guess you could argue: [sʈɻɛŋkθn̥d] ~ [sʈɻɛŋgðn̥d]. No idea where the syllable breaks should be if you analyze a reduced vowel or nasal syllabic.

[zompist]

I guess depending on how you analyze reduced vowels, a more liberal view might be:

<Strengthened> [sʈɻɛŋkθnd] ~ [sʈɻɛŋgðnd] and other agglutinated forms. Though, I guess you could argue: [sʈɻɛŋkθn̥d] ~ [sʈɻɛŋgðn̥d]. No idea where the syllable breaks should be if you analyze a reduced vowel or nasal syllabic.

I doubt that syllabic n/r/l should be allowed... but if they are, you can add words like fasteners /fæsn̩r̩z/ or pixels /pɪksl̩z/.

[vtardif]

Sixths - though that usually comes out as /sikTs/ rather than /siksTs/ for me.

[Particles the Greek]

He presumably meant "jinxed".

"HE"?

I did indeed; not for the first time, someone gets tripped up between the meaning of <j> in different phonological transcription traditions. And of course, I meant "four consonants". Thank you, Sal.

"Lengths" and "strengths" work if you have one of those dialects (don't most of us?) where an epenthetic /k/ is added between the /N/ and /T/.

I don't... thus my question, of course. I should have remembered "sixths", though.

[gmalivuk]

"thousandths" has 4 if I pronounce it carefully, with the additional unusual trait of ending with five consonant letters.

[KathTheDragon]

Only 3 for me, as the /n/ is syllabic. Twelfths has four consonants if all three fricatives are pronounced.

[Nortaneous]

If you allow loanwords, there's a Russian town called Berdsk.

This could conceivably be pluralized to give /berdsks/ or verbalized into /berdskt/, with five coda consonants.

[gmalivuk]

Only 3 for me, as the /n/ is syllabic.

Even if you pronounce it carefully? When I'm speaking quickly, the syllabic /n/ is followed by /ts/ or maybe just /s/, but when I say it slowly there's a vowel before the /n/ and all the consonants get their due. (Or maybe I say /t/ instead of /d/, but there's still some kind of stop in there for the 'd'.)

[KathTheDragon]

Yeah, it's always syllabic.

[Tropylium]

Does this question not basically reduce to "what english words have three **consonants in the coda, and are neither plurals, third person singulars, or past participles"?

Well, I guess there are occasional words like next that are verbed or pluralized scarcely enough to not really count ("the secretary then nexts in a new applicant?")

[KathTheDragon]

How?

[Tropylium]

How?

Look again at the examples so far:
jinx+ed
length+s
sixth+s
strength+s
text+s
twelfth+s
thousandth+s
I grant you can find loanwords that are worse, in which case allow me to go digging for Tashlhiyt or Ōgami placenames and present to you some "English words" that contain zero vowels…

[KathTheDragon]

Ah, you've changed what you wrote. At the time, it was still "three words". But yes, I can see how now that I know what you were asking.

[Rory]

This kind of question is relatively easy to answer with regex searches of corpora. A quick search of English CELEX reveals the following (most of which have already been mentioned):

• adjuncts
• attempts
• conjuncts
• contexts
• exempts
• glimpsed
• instincts
• jinxed
• mulcts
• pre-empts
• precincts
• pretexts
• prompts
• sculpts
• sixths
• tempts
• texts
• twelfths

(Apparently mulct is a noun meaning "a fine" and a verb meaning "to fine".)

This list appears to confirm the suspicion that there are no (standard) English morphemes with more than three consonants in the coda.