I am very proud of the amount of useless facts that I know. Put me in front of an episode of QI or a pub quiz and I’m in heaven. So, last week when a student asked me about the longest English word in class I rattled off a long answer about how there are some chemical names that are more than 1000 letters long but the longest word in the OED is ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification’.

Well, it’s not – it’s actually ‘Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’. The student directed me to this article via. the Macmillan Dictionary Blog as proof. I felt a bit silly about being wrong (even though I’m not an English teacher) but was happy to find out the correct answer to amaze my friends with at the next pub quiz I visit.

Knowing my luck, by the time I am asked this question again, someone will have already invented an even longer word!

Today’s image is by Dora Pete.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 8:28 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.