hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

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.)

ghost

You already know what a ghost is. So instead of the meaning, in this WOTW (as no one calls it), I’m looking at that silent ‘h’ nestled between the ‘g’ and ‘o’. It hasn’t always been there – back in the 16th century, the word was spelled ‘gost’, as it comes from an Old English word, ‘gást’ (other spellings included gæst – ooh, I do love a ligature – goost, goist and goste). So how did the ‘h’ sneak in?

BOO! This picture is genuinely a bit unsettling, sorry. (Oh, and it’s by Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash.)

Well, we can blame this on William Caxton, the dude who introduced the printing press to us Brits in 1476. His first press was in Bruges (great film), and when he came back to Blighty to set up shop he brought some Flemish typesetters with him. One of them was called Wynkyn de Worde which is (a) an awesome name and (b) a nice case of nominative determinism (when your name matches your job). It seems that Caxton didn’t give a flying whatsit about spelling (gasp!), so largely left de Worde and his posse to it when they were typesetting English works. So if they came across a word that looked like a Flemish one, they tended to just use the Flemish version (because, why not?). And the Flemish word for ‘ghost’ was ‘gheest’. All of which means that they stuck an ‘h’ in our ‘gost’ whenever they typeset it. They did the same with ‘gastly’ and ‘agast’. Apparently they also tried it with ‘goat’, ‘goose’ and ‘girl’ but lucky for us, and small children trying to learn written English everywhere, those didn’t stick.

(I shamelessly stole this story from Susie Dent on Countdown, so thanks Suze.)

benighted

Benighted has two meanings – the one that you probably know (although I confess I thought it meant something else until I looked it up for this) is that it’s an adjective which describes someone who’s without morals or knowledge. There’s also a second older, and more literal, meaning which is to be overtaken by darkness – whacking the prefix ‘be’ on to the start of a word generally changes the meaning to making or causing to be, as in becalm or bedazzle. If you put the two meanings together then it all makes sense – if you’re short on morals or knowledge then you’re unenlightened, or in the (figurative, this time) dark.

The literal definition of ‘benighted’ has been around since the mid-1500s. Here’s a nice example of it in action from W.B. Yeats in ‘From The Tower’ (1928):

“Benighted travellers

From markets and from fairs

Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.”

(When I re-read that, the thought of seeing someone’s midnight candle glimmering made me giggle a bit, because I’m extremely juvenile and smutty. I’m sure you’re much more grown up than me though, and the thought never crossed your mind.)

endling

This is a bit of a sad one (sorry). An endling is the last known member of a species – so once it dies, that species (it can be an animal or a plant) is officially extinct.

The word was coined in the scientific journal ‘Nature’ in 1996. Other equally gloomy words for endling include ‘ender’ and ‘terminarch’. And if there’s a couple left, then they’re referred to collectively as a ‘relict’.

[This isn’t actually a Sehuencas water frog, but I couldn’t find a royalty-free one of those. Sorry.]

Etymology-wise, the ‘end’ bit of ‘endling’ is self-explanatory, I hope. Adding the suffix ‘-ling’ to a word either denotes that the thing is younger, smaller or inferior to the thing at the start (which is a terrible explanation but hopefully you get the gist) – think duckling, hatchling and so on. Or it can just mean that the thing is in the category described by the root word (that’s a slightly better explanation), as in earthling, and some other words which I can’t think of right now.

You can find a list of notable endlings on Wikipedia. It’s incredibly depressing though, so I wouldn’t recommend reading it if you’re feeling at all maudlin.

Now that we’re all thoroughly glum, here’s a nice story about an endling called Romeo, which I saw on QI this week (where I first heard the word). Romeo is a Sehuencas water frog, a native of Bolivia. He lives in Bolivia’s Natural History Museum (I suspect not voluntarily), and is 10 years old, which is pretty darn old in frog years. To try to see if he really is an endling, conservationists put a profile for Romeo on match.com. REALLY – you can see it here. (If you can’t be bothered to do reading, his profile begins with ‘Well, hi there. I’m Romeo. I’m a Sehuencas (pronounced “say-when-cuss”) water frog and, not to start this off super heavy or anything, but I’m literally the last of my species.’) Romeo had much better luck that I ever have with internet dating, and with money raised through the profile, some other conservationists found his Juliet in a Bolivian cloud forest (which is the most romantic-sounding thing ever), along with four other froggy pals. A breeding programme will be happening soon, so hopefully lots of Sehuencas tadpoles will follow. Hurrah!

(You can read more about R&J here.)