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June 27, 2008
What is the seven-syllable word most commonly used in ordinary conversation?
See here.
Posted by Andrew at June 27, 2008 12:18 AM
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Comments
Posted by: Joe Blitzstein at June 26, 2008 10:29 PM.
Posted by: Bill Jefferys at June 26, 2008 11:03 PM.
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.)
Posted by: Isabel Lugo at June 26, 2008 11:24 PM.
from that article, it says that miniscule is an incorrect spelling. to which i say:
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/mini.html
Posted by: andy at June 26, 2008 11:45 PM.
For question number 2 (most commonly misspelled word by otherwise good spellers) I'd vote "foilage," which is often misspelled "foliage."
Posted by: Richard D. Morey at June 27, 2008 12:00 AM.
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!
Posted by: Jeremiah
at June 27, 2008 12:53 AM.
Posted by: John S. at June 27, 2008 7:47 AM.
Posted by: ZBicyclist at June 27, 2008 10:08 AM.
Posted by: Kieran at June 27, 2008 10:56 AM.
"Heterogeneity" occurred to me, while "homogeneity" is short a syllable. But "homosexuality" is 7 syllables. Meanwhile I nominate "heterosexuality" for the 8 syllable competition.
Posted by: Joe Blitzstein at June 27, 2008 4:53 PM.
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.")
Posted by: Andrew
at June 27, 2008 5:06 PM.
Posted by: parinella at June 27, 2008 5:41 PM.
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!
Posted by: Chris at June 28, 2008 10:49 PM.
Somewhat rambling follow-up posted
Posted by: Ubs at July 8, 2008 2:21 AM.