longwords.txt

In choosing to provide a list of long words that you (or at least most of you) don’t know, I decided to eschew two very specific words: antidisestablishmentarianism and floccinaucinihilipilification – my presumption being that you will have run into both of them. When I was at school, I was unreliably informed that the longest English word was the first of these two, and later, when I went to university, I was unreliably corrected, when told that the longest English word was in fact the second of these two.

Antidisestablishmentarianism has 28 letters and can be blamed on the marital difficulties of Henry VIII, who, when forbidden to get a divorce by Pope Clement VII, set himself up as “Pope of the English Church” thus inconveniently linking the English church directly to the state. By the 19th century some British politicians had begun to conclude that this linkage was a bad idea (suffering perhaps from America envy) and they became known as disestablishmentarians. Naturally, other politicians opposed this and thus talked-the-talk as antidiestablishmentarians.

Floccinaucinihilipilification noses ahead of antidisestablishmentarianism by a single letter and it is a lot easier to define. It means the categorizing of something as worthless trivia. For example, my definition of antidisestablishmentarianism could, and probably should, be floccinaucinihilipilificated.

Both of these words were put into the shade by the Mary Poppins song; Super­cali­fragi­listic­expi­ali­docious, which a word of 34 letters. Technically this is a nonsense word, but if you believe the words of its song, this is a word that is properly used only if you can’t think of anything to say. Thus it is always used improperly, since if you can’t think of some thing to say, and you think to use this word, then you can think of something to say and hence shouldn’t say it.