There are lots of long english words, but not as long as few which are even pain to read. But you would be amazed to know that most of these words are commonly used in world of medicine. I always wonder where these words came from? And why are they so long? Have you ever wondered? I mean they could give it a shorter version like for Deoxyribonucleic acid we have DNA in other words Deoxyribonucleic acid short form is DNA.
But its not the case with every other long english words, here are some of them -
1. PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS (45 letters; a lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles) is the longest word in any English-language dictionary. (It is also spelled -koniosis.)
Can you read that word? I can’t I mean I tried to, but I get stuck after microscopic. If you thought that was super long and hard to pronounce then check out these ones which are good contenders :)
TETRAMETHYLDIAMINOBENZHYDRYLPHOSPHINOUS ACID – (39 Letters)
HEPATICOCHOLANGIOCHOLECYSTENTEROSTOMIES – (39 Letters)
FORMALDEHYDETETRAMETHYLAMIDOFLUORIMUM (37 letters)
DIMETHYLAMIDOPHENYLDIMETHYLPYRAZOLONE (37 letters)
SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS (34 letters)
English can be a fun language but at times it can be scary.
Fun Stuff
Another fun stuff for my readers, this time I found something awesome and something I bet everyone wonders once in a while. How did the toilet get its name?
Toilet seems an odd name for the bathroom’s chief plumbing fixture, but it makes sense when you consider that since the seventeeth century, “toilette” meant a lady’s dressing room. The chief purpose of the room was for cleaning up or changing clothes. The other business was done in an “outhouse.” When alavatory became attached during the early nineteenth century, the room changed its main purpose and not only kept its name toilette but applied it to the regal new sitting device. The beauty care and implements or “toiletries” assembled there were so named because they were placed on a fabric table cover called a toile. A toile, like a doily, is a netted decorative cloth.
There you goo….
Fun Stuff
Topic of the day for me to be honest. How come the word fags mean homosexual. I was in India last year and not many people know what fags mean, but looking back here in Canada almost everyone knows and people around USA too, so I was wondering how come the word fags means Homosexual. It took me few hours to research but I found a good answer from a book lying around.
“Faggot,” the cruel label for homosexuals, actually began as a contemptuous slang word for a woman, especially one who was old and unpleasant. The reference was to a burden that had to be carried in the same manner as baggage and harks back to the word’s original meaning.
In the thirteenth century, a faggot was a bundle of wood or twigs bound together, such as the ones carried by heretics to feed the fires that would burn them at the stake. Heretics who recanted were required to wear an embroidered figure of a faggot on their sleeves. It wasn’t until 1914 that the slang word faggot first appeared in the United States as a reference to a male homosexual, probably derived from the earlier reference to an annoying woman. The abbreviation fag surfaced in 1921.
There is a misconception that male homosexuals were called faggots because they were burned at the stake, but this notion is an urban legend. Homosexuals were sometimes burned alive in Europe, but by the time England made homosexuality a capital offence in 1533, hanging was the prescribed punishement.
The Yiddish word for male homosexual is faygele, which literally means “little bird.”
The English word faggot is derived from the Latin fasces via the French fagot, meaning “a bundle of wood.”
And there you go answer to one of the puzzling questions….
Fun Stuff