Please exclude any consecutive repetitions of letters - “beer” is out. “Almost” is the only six letter word I’ve found so far.
aegilops
From here:
Ah, thanks =)
Not that anybody gives a wet squirt, but Aegilops is a genus of plants called goatgrass, which grow alongside wheat crops.
Floccinoccinihilibification is a word I am familiar with but cannot find a source. I’m not sure if the spelling is correct, my own source is a game show a while back, where the longest word, made from 3 letters, was given points, eg the letters were FCB so the game contestants would often say floccinoccinihilibilification.
I say this word as flokki nokki nihill ibill ifi cation.
I think it might have changed (in my head) in the 15 years since i’ve heard it.
With 29 letters, it is the longest non-technical word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which presents it as “enumerated in a well-known rule from the Eton Latin Grammar”. The OED dates its first use in literature at 1741 in William Shenstone’s Works in Prose and Verse: “I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money”.
Though the OED gives no specifics on its derivation, the word is said to have been invented as an erudite joke by a student of Eton College, who, upon consulting a Latin textbook, found four words connoting ‘nothing’ or ‘worthless’, combined them, adding compound suffixes -i-, and -fication (as in e.g. glor-i-fication, from facio, “to make or do”)
Thankyou, thankyou et thankyou. It’s been bugging me for a number of years.