How many one-word movie titles are there? I found a list that has 1111 and funnily, it only takes until the second entry for a title to repeat (Abduction, 2011 & 2019). There’s something nice about a one word movie title. It provides an air of mystery around it and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Over a quarter of the Academy Award Best Picture winners have a one-word title including seven of the last ten, so if you want to win an Oscar . . . keep it brief.
I’ve already named an instance where two movies used the same one-word title, but surely Abduction (2019) could have changed to something else. Surely there must be a word in the English language that hasn’t been co-opted to label a struggling auteur’s shot at immortality. The premise is easy enough to prove. I just have to come up with a word that I doubt someone has made a movie out of.
Acetaminophen. It’s not even the first painkiller that comes to mind, surely no one has gone to that well yet.
The longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, per Merriam-Webster. There isn’t a movie called that yet, though there are a few podcast episodes out there. It’s a lung disease caused by silicates found in volcanic ash and honestly, that’s not the worst word to work backwards from to make a movie. Have a wizard cast a spell on the volcano that turns everyone that breathes the ash to turn into zombies and you’ve cranked out a summer blockbuster.
So I challenge aspiring filmmakers to hit all of them. Make a movie for every word in the dictionary so that anybody that tries to make a one-word title in the future has to copy you . . . and maybe has to pay you a small fee for the rights to use the name of your zombie-volcano movie that no one saw.
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a movie called Movie yet.
Syne Scratch 
Leave a comment