We’re going to be honest, our spellchecker just gave up when we tried typing “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” and we can’t really blame it. Clocking in at a mind-boggling 45 letters long, it’s one of the single longest words in the entire English language, dwarfing its better-known cousin, “antidisestablishmentarianism,” by 17 whole letters.
So what does it mean? Well, the word can technically be used to describe a very specific medical condition that can arise as a result of inhaling fine silica ash or dust, but you’d be hard pressed to find a doctor who’s even aware of the word because the condition described above already has a much shorter medical name: pneumoconiosis.
“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” was actually coined in 1935 by a guy named Everett Smith in a deliberate attempt to create a very long word. Smith came up with the word by combining a number of Latin terms before presenting it to the National Puzzlers’ League (NPL) during a presentation on “the ever-growing length of medical words.” Smith, who was the president of the NPL at the time, neglected to mention to any of the people present that the word wasn’t actually a medical term or that he was the one who’d made it up. Nevertheless, the word was able to “somehow” sneak its way into a dictionary a few years later—officially making it a real word, much to the annoyance of everyone who wasn’t in the NPL. Of course, this led to the sadly unproven rumor that they were the ones responsible for it being added to the dictionary.
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