Shortestshortest

Shortestshortest is a term used in wordplay and string theory to denote the simple concatenation of the word "shortest" with itself. In its plain form, it yields the 16-letter sequence "shortestshortest" produced by writing "shortest" twice in succession. The term serves as a compact example for studying repetition, word powers, and basic concatenation in formal and recreational contexts.

Formally, if s denotes the word "shortest", then s^2 equals "shortestshortest". This is a straightforward instance of a word power in combinatorics on words, illustrating how repeating a root yields a longer string. The construction has no internal overlaps beyond the trivial; it simply doubles the base with no shared border.

Related concepts include reduplication in linguistics, tautonyms in taxonomy, and the study of borders and overlaps in strings. The idea helps explain how language and computation handle repetition, and it provides a concrete example for teaching string properties such as length, indexing, and substring occurrence.

Usage examples appear in puzzles, textbooks, and programming exercises that introduce substring search and pattern matching. For instance, "shortestshortest" contains the substring "shortest" starting at positions 1 through 8 and 9 through 16, making it a clear demonstration of two non-overlapping occurrences in a single string.