Word of the Day

Am toying with the idea of starting up a Word of the Day Wednesday blog-ritual, ala my Show & Tell Tuesday efforts. Why here? Why now? For the love of this word alone:

FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION (29 letters!) - The action or habit of estimating as worthless.

Interestingly enough, still NOT the longest word in the English language. That honour is a little hard to pin down, as technically one can apply almost infinite prefixes & suffixes to some words. Plus you've got all those hideous technical/medical terms & chemical compounds which defy spelling bee logic & bloody well just don't roll off the tongue at all. If you're going to sensibly classify a word as a unit of language that native speakers can identify & use commonly in oral or written communication, then these don't really count in my book. For the sake of those trivia freaks (like me), the longest word currently listed in Oxford dictionaries is the supposed lung-disease pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters).

Comedian Red Skelton, on the other hand, defined the longest word in the English language as that which follows "And now a word from our sponsor."

And now the last word: zyzzyva. (hehehe - it's scary how much I amuse myself)