It’s a given that Google has pages for every valid English word in existence as well as most fantastical words. It’s very rare that Google comes up with nothing, even for nonsense or terribly misspelled words.

However, I stumbled upon a non-result for the word “submemberist”:

https://www.google.com/search?q=submemberist

Of course, by the time you click on the above query, Google will have crawled at least a few pages mentioning the word.

I guess it’s probably not a big deal to come up with arbitrary combinations of letters for which Google has no results. What was interesting about “submemberist” is that it looks like it could be a word. Though to be fair, the Oxford “Living” Dictionary only has it listed with a hyphen: “sub-member”.

I didn’t even know “submember” or “sub-member” was a word before I saw Parker Higgins (@xor) tweet some fun trivia about airport codes last night:

As far as I can tell, the longest words you can spell entirely out of airport codes are each 9 letters long. It's quite an evocative list of words, too. pic.twitter.com/ssNMRz3s5O

— Parker Higgins (@xor) March 28, 2018

Of all the 3-character codes, “IST” seems the most flexible when it comes to creating a legit combination with a 9-character word. Of course, “memberist” isn’t a word either, though Google at least has plenty of attempted results:

I wish I could say this blog post had a more important point about language or even search-engine optimization, but I just wanted to spoil the results for anyone else who ever searches for “submemberist” :p.

Update 2019-07-16: More than a year later, this blog is the only result for a google search of “submemberist”, which means my blog apparently isn’t notable enough to get content-scraped by SEO-spammers!