View Full Version : what does this word mean
regeneratorizer
05-30-2005, 08:30 AM
its not in the dictionary, it is a word though. the biggest word. im not sure how its spelled
antidisastablishmentedtarieism
Hammered
05-30-2005, 08:43 AM
The correct spelling is antidisestablishmententarianism. It has to do with the separation of church and state.
Sokko
05-30-2005, 10:11 AM
And despite what many people will tell you, it is not the longest word in the English language, only the most popular "long word". This is probably due to the fact that it's the only really long word that even a small child can pronounce with relative accuracy; I gather most people would have problems with "floccinaucinihilipilification", which is 1 letter longer but 10 times harder to say.
Some people consider "antidisestablishmentarianism" to be cheating, since it's constructed by taking the word "establish" and adding a crapload of prefixes and suffixes to it. Since English is an agglutinative language, you can generate perfectly legal words of arbitrary and infinite length by stringing modifiers together. A Greek poet made fun of this peculiar aspect (which occurs in many other languages) by constructing a 170-letter word describing a food simply by combining all its ingredients:
Lopadotemachoselacho*galeo*kranio*leipsano*drim*hy potrimmato*silphio*paraomelito*katakechymeno*kichl *epi*kossypho*phatto*perister*alektryon*opte*kepha llio*kigklo*peleio*lagoio*siraio*baphe*tragano*pte rygon.
Don't bother confusing yourself with this link. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_English)
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