No extremal square-free words over large alphabets

Abstract

A word is square-free if it does not contain any square (a word of the form $XX$), and is extremal square-free if it cannot be extended to a new square-free word by inserting a single letter at any position. Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and Niewiadomski proved that there exist infinitely many ternary extremal square-free words. We establish that there are no extremal square-free words over any alphabet of size at least 17.