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What’s The Longest Word You Can Write With Seven-Segment Displays?

Tom Scott | March 29, 2026



That’s right, we’re kicking Season 2 of the Basics off with a technical episode about a somewhat-obsolete technology! IT’S PARTY TIME. Wait, no, not party time. IT’S CODE TIME. Close enough.

Let’s talk about seven-segment displays, and about the longest word you can write with them.

Public domain list of English words: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words

Thanks to my proofreading team, and to Tomek on camera!

The Cambridge Centre for Computing History: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

BONUS LINK:
Genius regex crossword puzzle: https://regexcrossword.com/

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 28 comments.

  13. @CoolStuff-x69

    March 29, 2026 at 1:16 pm

    G: The 'C with aspirations' is fine.
    K: Just use a vertical line on the left and a horizontal line in the middle.
    M: This has to be done across two digits. Use a n across one and then the rest on the second digit.
    W: Same but using U.
    Q: A 9 has a bar on the bottom. The q does not.
    V: Two vertical bars on the lower half.
    X: Two vertical bars.
    Z: Two horizontal bars.
    I: 1 but on the lower quarter.
    O: Lowercase o.

  14. @TechnicallyTom

    March 29, 2026 at 1:16 pm

    If you stored the longest words in another array, you could reset the array if a longer word was found or push a word onto the array if it matched the longest word found so far. This would not add to the complexity of the code much but would allow all the longest words to be found if there were multiple correct answers.

  15. @CMStormRider

    March 29, 2026 at 1:16 pm

    For any geeks interested… The way I think I'd go about finding a list of similarly lengthily longest words would be to:

    1) Store the current longest word in an "longestAcceptableWordArrayList[]".
    2) Append the "longestAcceptableWordArrayList.add("Another Longest Acceptable Word")" if another word matches the length.
    3) If the current max length is exceeded, discard the array and re-create – including the new longest word as an entry in the newly created array >>> longestAcceptableWordArrayList.removeAll(); longestAcceptableWordArrayList.add("Even Longer Acceptable Word");
    4) Once the initial set of input words is exhausted, loop over longestAcceptableWordArrayList. >>> for (String word : longestAcceptableWordArrayList) { System.out.println(word);}

  19. @Vex_The_Vexillologist

    March 29, 2026 at 1:16 pm

    a long word u czn spell with 7 segment displays is AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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