Coolest Word

Okay... I think that this word has to be the coolest word ever:

hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian-  adj.,   1. having to do with a long word.

Well???!?!?!? Well?!!?!?!?  I think that is the COOLEST WORD EVER!!
OK, I wrote Merriam-Webster about this word and here's the response I got:


Dear Chris:

"Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian" is a word we've never seen before, and it looks pretty clearly like a word that someone made up for the sake of its length. There are a number of such words ("antidisestablishmentarianism" is another one), but they don't often get into dictionaries because they have no real use except when people are citing examples of long words. The longest word in our unabridged Webster's Third New International Dictionary is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," which is a whopping 45 letters long and is defined as "a pneumoconiosis caused by the inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust." Even this word, however, appears to have little or no use except as an example of an extremely long word.

Thanks for your interest.

Steve Perrault Merriam
-Webster Editorial Department


Chris is Chris Mathias