About 10 years ago, I decided to read the dictionary, in sequence, from first word to last.

I barely made it into the B’s.

My favorite of all those A-words I learned, was ‘abecedarian’ (which I just now had to add to Firefox’s built-in spellcheck).

I’m guessing it’s the word John Ciardi had in mind when he coined this one:

kelemenopy: A sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere.

To quote worldwidewords.com,

It was coined by John Ciardi, the American poet, in A Browser’s Dictionary in 1980. He said it was “from my own psychic warp, to see if anyone would notice, and because I have always dreamed of fathering a word”. (Haven’t we all?) The genesis of his creation was the sequence klmnop from the centre of the alphabet, with ten letters before and ten after it, which Mr Ciardi described as “a strictly sequential irrelevance”.

Ciardi talks about it here:

http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/4986368/6723168/npr_6723168.mp3

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