Daunting medical and scientific terms are often much less daunting than they first appear; on closer inspection, it becomes clear they’re made up of a series of shorter, familiar terms. Checking them out individually can make unpacking the meaning of the whole word a not so difficult walk in the park, albeit a longish one.
This week’s word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, is a case in point: you likely know - or suspect, I suspect - that pneumono has something to do with air or the lungs. Ultramicroscopic is certainly clear, and silico is a fairly obvious variant of silica. As for volcano, words don’t get much more familiar than that.
So far, then, we’ve got a term for what looks like some condition of the lung that relates to tiny particles of silica like those that come from volcanoes. That leaves only the suffix coniosis – the one part of the word likely to cause most of us problems. But even that’s not very mysterious. -osis comes from Ancient Greek and simply means state or condition – and we’re familiar with it from medical terms like acidosis, cirrhosis, diagnosis, endometriosis, and many others.
As for coni, well, this is where I am forced to admit that this week’s word is a complete fabrication created in 1962, according to one report, by seventh grade students at a school in Virginia, USA as an exercise in creating extremely long words. The rascals!
But then again, aren’t all medical and scientific terms fabricated? Tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles, didn’t exist (so to speak) before 1967. They were named by Gerald Feinberg who drew on the Greek tachys, meaning swift.
Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism, a real medical condition, was named in 1952 by Fuller Albright. Like this week’s word, it’s an agglomeration of smaller terms which, when unbundled, make the word fairly understandable. (The double appearance of pseudo is because sufferers of this condition have many of the symptoms of those with another condition called – wait for it – pseudohypoparathyroidism, but in fact don’t have the condition.)
If there’s one language that knows how to string long caravans of words and word parts together, it’s German. From 1999 its longest word was reputedly Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law). Sadly, the law was repealed in 2013, leaving words like donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (Danube steamship company captain (seriously)) to take up the slack. According to some editions of the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest published German word today is Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, aka the Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam Shipping Electrical Services. Sometimes called tapeworm words (Bandwurmwörter), such words were also dubbed alphabetical processions by the unimpressed AmericanauthorandhumoristMarkTwain.
Linguists, bless their little sober socks, simply call this practice compounding. It’s hardly unique to German; English does it too. Milkshake, anyone? And what about that gobsmacking sunrise this morning? Unlike German, however, English knows when to stop. Actually, German may also know when to stop, as evidenced by the fact that the longest published German word (see above) is not infinite, but ends after 79 letters. On the other hand, it may not; there is no theoretical limit on how long a German word can get.
Then again (yes, I am being wishy washy, aren’t I?), the longest word in English, assuming you’re being liberal in your definition of “word”, runs to an eye watering 189,819 letters. It’s the chemical composition of titin, the largest known protein, and reportedly takes up to three and a half hours to say, and I’m willing to bet no one’s fully tested that statement yet. Whether it should even be considered a word is disputed, to put it mildly. By comparison, the longest non-controversial word, antidisestablishmentarianism, is a mere 28 letters - although some dictionaries refuse to acknowledge it because it is almost never used except in obscure language posts. The longest word Shakespeare wrote is the Latin honorificabilitudinitatibus, which - if you accept it as an English word - is also the longest word in the language featuring alternating consonants and vowels.
I’ll pause here while you confirm this for yourself.
Shakespeare making a rare appearance at a small music festival. Photo by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash
Since you ask, honorificabilitudinitatibus means “able to achieve honours”, a fitting description for all Lingwistics readers in my opinion.
English also differs from German in that compounding is not mandatory - in fact, most English compound words are oldish, reflecting the fact that from about the 18th century it’s become usual to keep the parts of potentially compound words separate.
Doing that in German (and Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Dutch, while we’re at it) would be considered a mistake.
The moral of the story? There isn’t one (this isn’t Sesame Street). But here’s a non-moral: anyone can create a new word. It’s easy peasy. Dr Seuss did it all the time, so did Shakespeare and so do scientists and seventh graders. One of the easiest ways to do it is by jamming together a series of previously unconnected words or word parts that haven’t been joined together before.
You know how to join words together, don’t you?
Bits and specious
Titin is the third most abundant protein in muscle and plays an important role in muscle elasticity. Its name (the five-letter one) is a play on the Greek Titan.
If the chemical composition of titin isn’t a word, you may be asking, what exactly is it? According to Wikipedia, lexicographers regard generic names of chemical compounds as verbal formulae rather than English words. Spoilsports.
Nancy Friedman, a Substack writer I enjoy, has published a newsletter of usages that set her teeth on edge or, as she also calls them, graduate-level boo-boos. Most of what she says is spot on, but “just forget about [ever using] albeit”? What’s that word ever done to deserve banishment, Nancy? Here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say on the matter.
The final link in the body of today’s post is to a clip from one of the great film noir movies. One unique feature of it is that it’s the only movie ever to have had two Nobel Prize winners for Literature (Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner) work on the script.
Quote of the week
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
GK Chesterton
As a Greek, I had always assumed that the -coniosis part of the word referred to the greek word conis which means dust, so that
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis would refer to the lung condition of inhaling extremely small silica volcano dust.
Wikipedia seems to say the same.