A ‘rhopalic’ sentence is a sentence or a line of poetry in which each
word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word, according to Dmitri Borgmann in Language on Vacation. Here is an example given:
"I
do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing
handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality,
counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes
intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness." – attributed to Ramnath Ragunathan
Each word is a letter longer than the preceding. The first word has one letter, the last has 20 letters – and there are 20 words.