I tried excluding lower-case letters like that in Google books, but it didn’t seem to work—titles showed up that definitely should’ve been banned. And I don’t know of any length operators in Worldcat or Google Books.
Many, many things are published untitled. But I would still say that his claim- the shortest title- works if you don’t accept the empty title as a title (and assume periods are as least as wide as capital ’i’s).
Really? I’m surprised nobody has published a story with the title.
Maybe they have, but they were using a serif font.
I don’t know if anyone has. Try googling for “I”.
Er, maybe I should clarify. I’m surprise nobody has published a story with the title “”.
How would we know?
That it is non-searchable or non-discoverable is a unique trait that might make it searchable or findable; there are no boring numbers.
Well, you can try plugging it into Google Books or Worldcat. Unfortunately, neither has an option ‘search for all unsearchable books’.
Oh! Find all books of title length x, set x to <1. Or search all books -a -b -c -d … etc. Or get the entire catalog and sort by title length.
Worldcat looks sweet so far, thanks for mentioning it.
I tried excluding lower-case letters like that in Google books, but it didn’t seem to work—titles showed up that definitely should’ve been banned. And I don’t know of any length operators in Worldcat or Google Books.
Many, many things are published untitled. But I would still say that his claim- the shortest title- works if you don’t accept the empty title as a title (and assume periods are as least as wide as capital ’i’s).
It was just a joke, man.
If we were taking it seriously, I would have to point out the stuff in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%28disambiguation%29 and especially the newspaper i which is equally short horizontally, but even shorter vertically.