Floccinaucinihilipilification From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Floccinaucinihilipilification (or variously floccipaucinihilipilification, as described in You English Words by John Moore) is "the act of describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".
With 29 letters and 12 syllables, 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". In recent years the word has been used in many scholarly articles in philosophy.
