This Is the Longest Word You Can Type with Your Left Hand

Here’s a hint: It has 14 letters.

Hands of a businesswoman typing on a computer keyboard and holding phone in the other handNewnow/Shutterstock

A great wave starts as vast water
Cascades
Retracts
Affects trees, caves
Crests waver
Reverberate
As far as we sat
A race starter
Raced fast, faster
Created craters great
Graves wasted
Arrested
Water

Abracadabra! A slam poem about water, written with only my left hand.

That is, just using the letters Q, W, E, R, T, A, S, D, F, G, Z, X, C, V, and B, the letters that naturally fall under your left hand when typing on a QWERTY keyboard.

Your writing needs to get creative when you’re limited to these 15 letters, but that just makes it more interesting. It also introduces some brand new words to your vocabulary, like qat (also known as khat), a shrub found in Arabia and Africa whose leaves are chewed as a narcotic.

Another is tesseradecade, or a group of 14. Its plural form is also one of the longest words you can type with only your left hand. There’s actually a three-way tie for this distinguished title: tesseradecades, aftercataracts, and sweaterdresses. (Of course, none of them compare to the longest word in the English language.)

An aftercaratract is a clouding of the eye’s lens, typically after a surgery to remove cataracts. Probably not a word you use in everyday conversation. On the other hand, sweaterdresses is pretty mainstream, a dress that is either knitted or crocheted and always cozy. It is also, in my opinion, the most fun word to type out of the three. Go ahead, try it.

Now before you go composing that email about your sweaterdress tesseradecade, remember to review everything you type. These are the spelling and grammar errors that spell check won’t catch.

Claire Nowak
Claire is a writer, editor and digital strategist with more than 10 years of experience reporting on facts, trivia and quotes. Her natural curiosity lends itself to stories on history, trivia and "Did you know?" curiosities, and her work has appeared in Taste of Home, The Family Handyman, The Healthy and iHeart Media. A former editor at Reader's Digest and proud Marquette University grad, she lives in Milwaukee with her fiancé and their corgi and enjoys binge-listening to true-crime podcasts.