Members of GQ-reading community, courtesy of MrDibble, have just been informed, if they didn’t know, that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is what a doctor should check you for if you live near a volcano and breathed in more ash than was good for you.
Moreover, when mentioning that, you can say that you just used, according to Wiki:
…[mumble mumble …] a word invented by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League as a synonym for the disease known as silicosis. It is the longest word in the English language published in a dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as “an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.”[3]
Can anyone hazard what the OED people deliberated when they gave their Seal of Approval to that one, as opposed to other goofy ones no doubt concocted?
For example and contrast, valid “words”–not concocted in the sense of the above, but valid and “sensible” within the communication code using letters–are formable in chemical names, conceivably to extraordinary lengths, even excluding repetitions, eg for a polymer.
OED apparently rejected any of those.
What do the language puzzlers/enthusiasts/linguistics people say on this? We can save for some other time the philosophy of language word (representation)-vs.-thing (represented) level of answering the OP, I think.
There is no longest word in the english language as you can always add affixes to increase the length. As no one owns the english language, you can consider pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis valid if you like.
The longest word in the dictionary (which one? there are many.) is up to the lexicographers and editors who write them. To merit inclusion, a word must meet certain tests, such as prolonged usage, widespread usage and meaningful usage. Words that are well-known for being long words but aren’t used for ‘meaning something’ in conversation aren’t usually entered for that reason.
I think that’s the point the OP is making. People talking about the disease use the common term silicosis. The term pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was just made up to be a long word. So why did the OED decide to accept it as a valid word?
Presumably it showed up in enough texts that the OED felt is was worth recording. They aren’t arbitrating what is or isn’t a valid word, they’re providing a resource for people in the future.
We’d have to contact the editors to get a real answer. The OED functions as a historical record of the language in addition to more usual dictionary functions so perhaps they felt it had value beyond simply being a long word.
On a side note, the wiki article is incorrect. The definition they list is from the Oxford Dictionaries, not the OED. Though it is in the OED as well:
“a word invented (probably by Everett M. Smith (born 1894), president of the National Puzzlers’ League in 1935) in imitation of polysyllabic medical terms, alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine sand and ash dust’ but occurring only as an instance of a very long word.”.
Funny, I first noticed that word in a dictionary of terms used by the mining industry, and I noticed it because they had changed the type to be smaller and more condensed, so they could get this whole word in bold on one line without hyphenating. This dictionary (maybe it was a glossary) was published in the late '70s. The definition was, basically, “Black lung.”
The answer as to why they included it is because it shows up in lots of places. Dictionaries as a general rule, do not go out of their way to make up new words or include ones that aren’t in use.
The reason it’s shows up in many places (mostly lists of long words, as they say) is because it was in Webster’s 2nd Unabridged, published in 1934. Webster’s basically ignored the rule I cited above for some reason. So I’ve put it back a step. So don’t ask the OED, ask M-W.
Because people also use the common term influenza.
Plus, as RealityChuck said, OED policy is that if the term occurs in the corpus of English literature, such that a reader may wish to find a definition, the OED will include it, marking it if appropriate as “obs.” or “arch.”. A word doesn’t have to be in current use to be included in a usage-based dictionary.
For the record, the OED does not mark influenza as obsolete or archaic. In fact they place it in “frequency band 5”, occurring between 1 and 10 times per million words in typical modern English usage. Words in this frequency band “tend to be restricted to literate vocabulary associated with educated discourse”. Other band 5 words include surveillance, assimilation, tumult, penchant, paraphrase, admixture.
Dictionaries don’t care that much about where words show up, just whether they do or don’t. If people see an unfamiliar word, some of them are going to look it up in the dictionary. It doesn’t matter where they see it.
We had a discussion of this word in some earlier thread. Someone claimed their doctor used the word. No doubt he liked long or unusual words.
Let me modify that statement somewhat. The OED does give more credence to words that appear in famous author’s works. For instance, when they were first compiling words for it, someone went through Shakespeare and supplied every word he used and they pretty much all ended up in the dictionary. That’s why Shakespeare has a rep for coining lots of words; for many of those words, it was the earliest cite they had. Since then, they’ve found earlier cites for some of them and the number “credited” to Shakes has gone down.
But he’s not the only one. For instance, there’s some words in the OED from James Joyce that have probably never (or at best, rarely) been used by other authors. But they only do this for words where they can figure out the meaning (not always possible with Joyce). So there’s a few (3, I think) 100-letter conglomerations in Joyce that are not in the OED. Even those don’t usually end up on long-word lists.
At any rate, p45 (as it’s sometimes called) shows up in sufficient different places that they included it. Probably the next Webster’s Unabridged (if they ever produce #4) will have it too. They dropped it in the Third.
I learned the word in Mr Blazer’s freshman English class in 1960. We were expected to be able to spell it, define it, and use it in conversation. And we did. I have used it all my life, although mainly as an example of a difficult word.
Mr Blazer was a very precise, eloquent man. Years later I ran into him at a small store. Surprised, I blurted out, “Gee, I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.” Then I stammered out something about how that probably wasn’t proper English.
He replied, “Mr Thompson, that is a perfectly proper response for someone raised in various regions of the South, predominantly centered in the Appalachian area. But you, however, were not.”