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The Longest Word…
Watched the finale of “The Scholar” last night. There’s nothing on TV anymore. Anyhow, they brought up, according to them, the longest word in the English language‚Äîpneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The word means, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica or quartz dust, and contains 45 letters. However, there is dispute that it’s really the longest word and more of a made up word created by someone wanting to claim the title of having the longest word.
In actuality, scientific words could be the longest with over a million characters, but pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest in a non-technical dictionary, but floccinaucinihilipilification, with 29 letters, is considered by Guiness to be the longest word in the English language. However, Antidisestablishmentarianism is the popular choice for the longest word.
Of course, authors create their own words, but none are truly considered “real” words, since they’re only used once or twice within the authors own works. According to Wikipedia, James Joyce used the 101 letter word, Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn¬?tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnu, in his book Finnegans Wake to represent the symbolic thunderclap which itself represents the fall of Adam and Eve. And a McDonalds campaign used the word, Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun, to describe it’s Big Mac sandwich
Anyhow, watching The Scholar, one of the guys asked one of the girls to spell the word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which she did right there without a beat.
The winner ended up being the one of the girls with the lower test scores (SAT, etc.), but made up for it with her leadership skills and motivation. She was chosen by three people who’s job it is to accept students into Ivy league colleges. Just goes to show you that grades aren’t as important as how well rounded you are, which is also true in the working world.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 at 7:36 am and is filed under Entries, Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.