By virtue of having one more letter than antidisestablishmentarianism, this is the longest non-technical English word. A mash up of five Latin roots,
it refers to the act of describing something as having little or no
value. While it made the cut in the Oxford English Dictionary,
Merriam-Webster volumes refuse to recognize it, chalking up its
existence to little more than linguistic ephemera.
Even more impressive, the output of one morphological rule can be the input to another, or to itself: one can talk about the unmicro- waveability of some French fries or a toothbrush-holder fastener box in which to keep one's toothbrush-holder fasteners. This makes the number of possible words in a language bigger than immense; like the number of sentences, it is infinite. Putting aside fanciful coinages concocted for immortality in Guinness, a candidate for the longest word to date in English might be floccinaucinihilipilification, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial." But that is a record meant to be broken: floccinaucinihilipilificational: pertaining to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalize: to cause something to pertain to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalization: the act of causing some- thing to pertain to the categorizing of something as worth- less or trivial