I thought I’d start a little summer series on the longest words in English.
But then I realized the longest words are all scientific and boring.
(No offense to you scientists who use the chemical name for the titin portion that takes FIFTY-SEVEN PAGES to write. It has almost 200,000 letters. Which feel ridiculous. Call it something like “titan longus maximus” and be done. Also, for those of you with insane amounts of time to kill, apparently there’s a YouTube video where a man sounds it out for you. But it’s just over three hours long.)
Instead, today let’s talk about more common words that are still really long.
I’m going to skip the lung disease Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters), and the thyroid condition Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters), and get to words we use.
Because it is so pleasing that another really long word is
Floccinaucinihilipilification.
Coming in at twenty-nine letters, it means the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.
Which is just so perfect since it, itself, is pretty worthless as a word.
As you can guess, it’s almost never used. Except in articles about really long words.
Stay tuned for so much more fun with long words in the next couple of weeks.
Writing Update:
I’ve been quiet around here because I’ve been working like crazy to get book 2 of The Keeper Chronicles done. I have lots of good book things coming up soon.
I’m publishing and expanded version of A Threat of Shadows, which is Book 1 of the Keeper Chronicles at the end of August, and Book 2 will follow quickly after.
Stay tuned for peeks at maps, artwork, covers, giveaways, and all sorts of good bookish things.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks