My new bride, Karen, and I -- stuck in a ferry queue at the start of our honeymoon -- passed the time playing Superduperghost. This is like the word game Ghost, but each time a person adds a letter to the previous string, the new letter can go anywhere in that string. (So a turn consists of reciting the entire new string.) After Karen recited "HREMS" it was my turn, and I couldn't think of anything but HAREMS, which would be a loss for me, of course, so I gave up. But later I searched a word list and found two more common words (both which would've ended on me anyway). Without using any kind of software, I challenge y'all to find the shorter of these two (Scrabble-eligible) words, which happens to have only 8 letters. (The grep search would be something like .*H.*R.*E.*M.*S.* but no fair doing one!) --Dan