Word of the month

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pisces
@pisces
19 Years1,000+ PostsGemini

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Q. What is the longest word in the dictionary?
A. It depends . . .
It might be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which appears in the Oxford English Dictionary), unless you want to count names of diseases (such as 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis', defined by the OED as "a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust' but occurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word"), places (such as 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch', a village in Wales), chemical compounds (apparently there is one that is 1,913 letters long), and also a few words found only in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Other words famous for being sesquipedalian:

antidisestablishmentarianism ("opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England")
floccinaucinihilipilification
honorificabilitudinitatibus (Which appears in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, and which has been cited as [dubious] evidence that Fran
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Illmatic
@Illmatic
20 Years1,000+ PostsPisces

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lol you actually looked it up

wierdo


"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is the 34-lettered song title from the 1964 movie Mary Poppins. As a song title, it is a proper noun, but the word, and variations, has entered the English language as an adjective and an adverb. It is one of the longest words in the English language. According to the Sherman Brothers, the word was created by them when they were boys at Summer Camp.

The song describes using the word as a miraculous way to talk oneself out of difficult situations, and even as a way to change one's life. The song appears in the film's animated sequence where Mary Poppins is harangued by reporters after winning a horse race and responds to one claiming there are not words to describe her feelings of the moment. Mary disagrees with that and begins the song about one word she can use.

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Illmatic
@Illmatic
20 Years1,000+ PostsPisces

Comments: 0 · Posts: 1169 · Topics: 38
"words have to be 1000 characters, my round brown ass"

continued...

The word itself has obscure origins, pertaining as to when it was first used, but the roots are fairly clear, as Richard Lederer wrote in his book Crazy English: super- "above," cali- "beauty," fragilistic- "delicate," expiali- "to atone," and docious- "educable," the sum meaning roughly "Atoning for extreme and delicate beauty while still being highly educable."