The word of the week is going on holiday for a while (it’s been working really hard and it deserves it). So I thought I’d better make it a good one. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (phew) means a fear of long words.
Photo by Dušan Smetana on Unsplash.
Basically this is one big wordy joke. And whether or not it’s a ‘real’ word is debateable. There’s a shorter version – ‘sesquipedaliophobia’ – which turns up in The Aldrich Dictionary of Phobias and Other Word Families (published in 2002). ‘Phobia’ means ‘fear of’ (from Phobos, the Greek personification of fear – check out this blog post for more words we get from ancient Greek), while ‘sesquipedalian’ means having many syllables. That dates back to 1656, and comes from a Latin word ‘sesquipedalis’, which literally means a foot and a half long. From what I can gather, some wordy wag (those lexicographers are a wacky lot) then added the ‘hippo’ and the ‘monstro’ to make it even longer and, presumably, more scary sounding. Which is very unfair on any hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobics out there.
Bonus fact: the longest word in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. It’s a lung disease you catch from inhaling very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano. So not much chance of getting it in Suffolk then. Which is lucky as I’d never be able to tell people what was wrong with me.
(See you back here in January for more words of the week.)