Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

great-great-great-great-grandmother

I was going to say 'antidisestablishmentarianism', but I changed my mind.

Their answer probably isn't a bad guess for the seven-syllable word that I use most often in ordinary conversation.

But I'm a zngurzngvpvna. (Rot13; decode here; the word in plaintext would perhaps be a spoiler.)

from that article, it says that miniscule is an incorrect spelling. to which i say:

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/mini.html

For question number 2 (most commonly misspelled word by otherwise good spellers) I'd vote "foilage," which is often misspelled "foliage."

I am guessing: inapplicability. Mainly because it is the only 7 syllable word in every day usuage that I could come up with after several minutes. Which, of course, makes it a great candidate for my guess!

Extraordinarily.

Around the office here, it's "disintermediation", but we may not be typical ;)

Unfuckingbelievable.

"Heterogeneity" occurred to me, while "homogeneity" is short a syllable. But "homosexuality" is 7 syllables. Meanwhile I nominate "heterosexuality" for the 8 syllable competition.

Wow . . . the hive-mind truly is impressive. The best I could come up with was "anti-globalization." (Then again, that's better than my best 16-letter word, which was "underwaterfridge.")

For misspelled words, I'd go for "loose" instead of "lose".

My colleague Allan Wilks figured he would tackle this with actual data. He ran an awk script through the unix 'dict' function to find syllables and then ran the 7 syllable words through google and sorted by number of hits:

the top 10:
[27800000 telecommunication,
19200000 interdisciplinary,
19000000 meteorological,
17000000 socioeconomic,
15100000 intelligibility,
8080000 heterogeneity,
6260000 autobiographical,
5660000 incompatibility,
5010000 industrialization,
3880000 epidemiologic ].

Of course, Allan's employer (and mine) is pleased with the #1 word!

Somewhat rambling follow-up posted