The Style Invitational

A sleepwalking grande dame who lived right off Park

Would often roam 'round in her penthouse so dark.

Her odd cause of death (this required no probe):

She hung from a ledge in a plus-sized,* humorous,* tangled* robe.*

This week's contest takes you back to the Internet, to an intriguing Web site called http://WordCount.org . This site, shown to the Empress by Art Chimes of Arlington, lists -- horizontally in one lonnnnng line -- 86,800 English words, from "the" to "conquistador," including names, in order of the frequency in which they appear in a collection called the British National Corpus (which would explain why "London" pops up at No. 242, while "Washington" festers down at 2,932). Our contest: W rite a poem of no more than four lines containing four or more consecutive words on the WordCount list. They must occur in the sentence in the order they appear on the list, but they may be interspersed with other words of your choice -- even though the example above (by our own Bob Staake) extra-cleverly uses Nos. 12184-12187 adjacently . Warning: You won't be looking at all 86,800 words. Not even if you are, say, Invitationally Obsessed Chris Doyle of Forsyth, Mo. Because the site permits you to scroll up and down the list one word at a time. So what you'll do is search for a word that occurs to you, or a certain rank, and you'll be shown that and the ones around it.

The winner receives the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. First runner-up wins a Porky Pooper! [TM], a little plastic pig that "trots out tasty treats," namely little brown jelly beans, discourtesy of Elden Carnahan of Laurel.

Other runners-up win a coveted Style Invitational Loser T-shirt. Honorable mentions get one of the lusted-after Style Invitational Magnets. One prize per entrant per week. Send your entries by e-mail to losers@washpost.com or, if you really have to, by fax to 202-334-4312. Deadline is Monday, July 25. Put "Week 619" in the subject line of your e-mail, or it risks being ignored as spam. Include your name, postal address and phone number with your entry. Entries are judged on the basis of humor and originality. All entries become the property of The Washington Post. Entries may be edited for taste or content. Results will be published Aug. 14. No purchase required for entry. Employees of The Washington Post, and their immediate relatives, are not eligible for prizes. Pseudonymous entries will be disqualified. The revised title for next week's contest is by Brendan Beary of Great Mills.

Report from Week 615, in which we asked for some material that could be used by comic Dave George, who's paid by Independence Air to tell jokes at Dulles.

Third runner-up: Would the owner of a red and tan Boeing 737 please report to the tarmac? Your lights are on. (Eric Murphy, Chicago; Russell Beland, Springfield)

Second runner-up: Pan American Airways Flight 213 to Idlewild Airport is now ready for boarding. We apologize for the delay. (Noah M. Bartlett, Washington)

First runner-up, winner of the welder's mask: Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to recognize some special groups we have on the flight today: The "Fat and Proud of It" Club of Burke; the panel of judges returning home from the Fourth Annual Cooking With Garlic Competition; the Society of Pauly Shore Impersonators; and the National Association of Families With Colic-Prone Twins. Welcome aboard! (Russell Beland)

And the winner of the Inker: Attention, passengers: We've just been informed that a butterfly has flapped its wings in Brazil. So be prepared for flight delays. (Stephen Dudzik, Olney)