I started thinking about words having—but mostly not having—the same letter three times consecutively because of safflowers, which are one of the flowers I regularly buy for making arrangements. I love their bright orange or reddish-orange petals that pop up out of green sacks, looking like less-threatening bull thistles.1 And I like safflowers' smell, which I find to be similar to calendulas' or marigolds'.2
In this arrangement from January, I combined safflowers with bupleurums. Both flowers are packaged as unnamed fillers at Trader Joe’s, where I buy most of my flowers, but I think they looked simply beautiful paired together, without any showier blossoms to distract the eye from them. And the bupleurums' long-lasting, round foliage worked well with the leafless safflower stems, whose more-conventional-looking leaves I'd stripped off.
Where was I going with this post? Oh, yeah—words with three of the same letters in a row. I thought safflower was probably like chaffinch, the name of a European bird that lost an f when it went from two words to one. But I see nothing online to suggest that safflower was ever saff flower.
There are precious few if any words in the three-of-the-same-letter category that are accepted as standard English by the major dictionaries. A commenter in an eight-year-old Reddit thread I found online copied over an Ask Oxford piece that said "the complete Oxford English Dictionary does contain instances of frillless, bossship, countessship, duchessship, governessship, and princessship, and the county name Rossshire." OED.com doesn't permit you to search a word or two without having a subscription, so I can't verify that old claim is still valid.
The bottom line with these words in modern American English is: either they are hyphenated ("skill-less") or one of the tripled letters is dropped ("skilless"). I generally prefer the hyphen because it's so clear what you're saying and why you're saying it that way. Readers might pass by "skilless" without thinking twice about what it meant, but they also might get hung up on it.
Merriam-Webster.com's entry for skill names the word in question as an adjective derived from skill. The listing is worded "skill-less or skilless," which means M-W believes both options are acceptable and neither is better than the other; they are equal variants. (If also had been used instead of or, that would have meant the second option is less commonly used and is considered a secondary variant.)
Another commenter in the Reddit thread suggested paleooologist, one who studies fossilized eggs, should be recognized as a valid word. M-W doesn't have an entry for it.
Yet another commenter threw out the word laparohysterosalpingooophorectomy. Emery University Medical School's Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics has a webpage that says laparoscopic salpingo-oophorectomy is the removal of one or both ovaries and fallopian tubes using a surgical technique that involves only a few small incisions, so that explains most parts of the commenter's word. M-W says hystero-salpingo-oophorectomy is "surgical removal of uterus, oviducts, and ovaries." I couldn't find a word similar to the commenter's word in a source I trusted without a hyphen after the first of the three consecutive o's.
M-W lists princeship as a noun derived from prince but doesn't do the same for princessship and princess. It has entries for godship and goddess-ship, so I assume M-W's editors would opt for princess-ship too.
The last thing I'll mention about this subject is that while M-W often opts for using a hyphen in longer nouns and adjectives, it tends to drop a letter in short words that would otherwise require two e's, a hyphen, and another e. Freer and freest are the comparative and superlative versions of the adjective free, and freer is also the person who frees someone or something.
However, seer and see-er are both legitimate ways of referring to one that/who3 sees (with seer also meaning one who predicts). M-W doesn't recognize peer as meaning "one who pees." But, of course, we drop an e when we put pee in the past tense: peed. And, similarly, it doesn't say whether tweer and tweest are the correct comparative and superlative for twee, so maybe I should say that while Tony and I have been enjoying watching this 15-year-old TV show on HBO Max, it's definitely one of the most twee series ever to air in prime time.
I'm going to end this post with two shots of one of my favorite arrangements, which I made about a month ago. It consists of sunflowers, mums that look like small sunflowers, and what I refer to as fuzzy green filler.
1Those "sacks" are made of bracts: modified leaves that support the flowers. The bracts and leaves of wild safflowers have spines, like thistles, but humans have developed spineless varieties.
2It's no surprise that safflowers should have similarities to those other three flowers because—like sunflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and many other favorites—they're all members of the composite family: Asteraceae. What we tend to call these plants' individual flowers are actually many flowers, of one or two types, grouped together into a lovely whole. They may consist of disc flowers, ray flowers, or both. The classic example of the sunflower has disc flowers throughout its center, with ray flowers surrounding the disc. Both types of flower can become pollinated and produce a seed.
3For the longest time, I've thought it was incorrect to speak of a person "that"4 does something. (Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, once did too, so I'm in good company.) It's not wrong to use that in that manner, but who certainly sounds more natural and proper in that context.
4That linked M-W entry for that offers up further possibilities for word nerdery. Comparing the 4a definition with the 1a–d definitions could take up a blog post. And those is the plural of that when it's used as a pronoun! It makes total sense, but if you had asked me yesterday what the plural of that was, I'm not sure I would have come up with that answer.