Coffee Talk: Useless but Satisfying Explorations of Noteworthy English Words

Word with the most definitions, longest, commonest, and so forth, in case you need an excuse to just sit and read for a few minutes

Generated via human prompt

There was a slight glitch the first time I posted this—so I’m reposting.

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Ever wonder what word in English has the most definitions? Recent updates to the Oxford English Dictionary say it’s the word run. As a verb, run boasts around 645 definitions. But remember that run is also a noun (oh, the horror of when the scourge of a work day was a run in one’s pantyhose) with 109 definitions, making the grand total 754 — close enough to 1,000 to be impressive.

You’d think we could come up with some verbal variety, wouldn’t you?

While we’re on the subject of words, two of the longest are pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters) and the chemical name for the protein titin, which has 189,819 letters. That equates to about 29,203 and 37,964 words, depending on how you estimate word count, or something like half the length of a novel.

That titin thing is technically a word in a scientific context, but you really can’t count it as a spoken or written word. I mean, have you ever even seen it written? And I’ve read that it would take over three hours to pronounce.

If you crave details, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a technical term for a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine silica or quartz dust, specifically from a volcano. It’s kind of a cheat, though, since it was intentionally conjured up in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers’ League, to be the longest word.

If we want to be practical and consider words that might be used in everyday language, the longest would be far shorter, like antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters), which defines opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England. That one is edged out for longest by floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters), meaning the act or habit of estimating something as worthless. Seems like an ironic waste of letters and breath to denote something valueless.

I’ll wrap up this sesquipedalian loquaciousness and tell you what word we use most frequently. No, it isn’t the eff word — though that one is tediously prevalent in contemporary writing and speaking — the is the true workhorse of the English language, quietly doing its job in nearly every phrase, sentence, and, well, the entire conversation. Try to write a story without using the; I’ve used it almost two dozen times in this post.

That lowly but essential definite article appears far more often than any other, but runners up include forms of the verb to be, to, of, and and.

One final entry in my linguistic spelunking is a nostalgic gander at supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Contrary to popular belief, the word did not originate with the Disney Company’s production of Mary Poppins in 1964, although the songwriters of that film laid claim to having invented it.

Au contraire, Merriam Webster says,

In fact, the earliest known written record of a variant is for supercaliflawjalisticexpialidoshus from an “A-muse-ings” column by Helen Herman in The Syracuse Daily Orange (Syracuse University), March 10, 1931. The columnist muses about her made-up word, describing it as including “all words in the category of something wonderful” and “though rather long and tiring before one reaches its conclusion, once you arrive at the end, you have said in one word what it would ordinarily take four paragraphs to explain.”

So there.

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People like me make a satisfying living with words. If you’d like to increase your likelihood of doing the same, go snag a free ebook and get to know a digital course called Write-Earn-Repeat. Cha-ching!