Supercalifragil... Long Words

In several August blogs I mentioned the Wikipedia listing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_with_uncommon_properties. There were parts of the listing that made me wonder “Who has time to check these things out?” But since they do, we might as well honor that research:

Looking for odd and unusable information about words and letters? “Faulconbridge is a town in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia. The town's name uses half of the alphabet, including all five vowels, and does not use any individual letter twice.”

Not concerned with repetition but trying to avoid double vowels or double consonants? Honorificabilitudinitatibus (27 letters), Shakespeare's longest word (see August 22), alternates consonants and vowels, as do the slightly more prosaic medical terms hepatoperitonitis and mesobilirubinogen (both 17 letters). The longest such words that are reasonably well known may be overimaginative, parasitological and verisimilitudes (all 15 letters, the last of which will make for a good future blog, to tell the truth). As a country, United Arab Emirates (18 letters) is unsurpassed for length in its vowel/consonant alternation.

Apparently those people who have time and inclination for these kinds of words have developed a few words of their own to describe categories. The word isogram is used to describe a word in which no letter is used more than once. (Remember Faulconbridge?) Uncopyrightable, with fifteen letters, is the longest common isogram.

Speaking of long words, I remember when antidisestablishmentarianism (at 28 letters) was considered the longest word in the dictionary (the dictionary being the Oxford English Dictionary). It has since been overtaken by pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
The history of the p word (known as P45) as recorded in Wikipedia is interesting: “This word was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, at its annual meeting. The word figured in the headline for an article published by the New York Herald Tribune on February 23, 1935 titled ‘Puzzlers Open 103d Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word’:

“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers' League at the opening session of the organization's 103rd semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker. The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust...”

For purists, the Guinness Book of Records in 1992 (and thereafter) declared floccinaucinihilipilification to be the “longest real word” at 29 letters. F29 (as I call it) is a good word that should get more usage. It refers to “the act or habit of estimating as worthless.” Its first known usage is in 1741 in the Eton Latin Grammar. It is actually a combining of four Latin words used together in a rule, all four words having the meaning of “small price” or “for nothing”. (The words were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pilifi.) The combining of these four words in such a monumental word to describe such a little thing was considered great fun in 1741, the television not having been invented yet.