Words whose letters are in alphabetical order

What is the longest word in English whose letters are in alphabetical order? The answer seems to be seven letters or, at a stretch, eight. Only two such words showed up in the Advanced Learners Dictionary, beefily and billowy, but several more turned up in the Summer Institute of Linguistics list of 250,000 words. They are
adelops
animals whose feet are not visible
alloquy
act of speaking to another (as against soliloquy)
beefily
in a beefy fashion
begorry
variant of begorra, Irish expletive rarely heard
billowy
characterised by billows
egilops
(1) An ulcer of the eye; (2) a kind of grass
The last of these exists in an alternative spelling of aegilops, so there is the only eight-letter word.

Apart from spoonfeed (which might be disallowed, since many dictionaries give it only as a hyphenated word spoon-feed), there are also no words longer than seven letters whose letters are in reverse alphabetical order. Among the seven-letter words, most are past tenses, such as

but there are also these oddities:
troolie
a palm tree
tsoneca
Patagonian tribe and its language

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Page created by John Higgins on 26 January, 1999, updated May 2017.