Imagine, a 20 year old hippie who refused to miss William Buckley's broadcasts. And today "sesquipedality" arrives in my mailbox - the contradictions (& memories) are delicious - gonna' go get some beans !
DW

i have not known this word, but the root is same as another word which i always use to teach my students. It used to be one of the longest words before the advent of long names for unearthly chemicals. The word is

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaeliophobia. You can break it down as :

hippo poto monstroses quippe daelio phobia.

If you can see, the root is the same as today's word.

neo.

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaeliophobia

From Greek hippos 'horse' + potomos 'river' + Latin monstrum 'monster' + sesqui- 'one and a half' + pes (pedis) 'foot' + Greek phobia 'fear'. A variant spelling based on the etymology of the word is: hippopotomonstrosesquipedeliophobia.

supercalifragilisticoespialidoso...

WELCOME DAVID W

and you too, NEO

The non-indo-european language Finnish is impressively sesquipedalian because of agglutinative word formation.
Numbers are written out as in for example the number 9,876:
ydeksäntuhattakahdeksansataaseitsemänkymmentäkuusi.

Welcome! Lets see what it does in the indo-european language Dutch:

9,876
ydeksäntuhattakahdeksansataaseitsemänkymmentäkuusi. (Fnl)
9,876
negenduizendachthonderdzesenzeventig (Ndl)

And the lucky winner is: Yes!! Finland.

However we have a serious word that is not a number that only counts one letter less that this Finnish number:

potentiaalvereffeningswandcontactdoosafdekplaatje 49 (Ndl)
ydeksäntuhattakahdeksansataaseitsemänkymmentäkuusi 50 (Fnl)


377,897 - driehonderdzevenenzeventigachthonderdzevenennegentig outruns the Finnish number. ( what is the Fins for 377,897?)

Fin: ydeksäntuhattakahdeksansataaseitsemänkymmentäkuusi

Eng: ninethousandeighthundredandseventysix

Ndl: negenduizendachthonderdzesenzeventig

Maori: ivatauatinivarurauitungaurumaono

gesundeit (or whatever)

something to say when you have nothing to say...........

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

how about going to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysili ogogogoch but as that is a place I will suggest Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis as one of the longest words in English

ogogogoch, agreed!

Titin is the longest 'word' in the English language, being 189, 819 letters long. But as its 'a chemical formulae' some consider it not a word but a collection of words strung together.
It can't be found in dictionary, but when I googled the longest English word that is what I found.

This is video of someone saying the word (I got tired of it after 2 minutes it takes over 8 minutes to say.)

you tube

Been to Llanfair....and we've discussed it before here,
but it is a neat place, love the pronunciation.

I hope you won't mind I gave it a look but did not sit this one out.

I tried: made it maybe a minute and a half.
Interesting word, tho.

hmmm makes you understand why people felt the need to invent text language...much "qckr 2 sy"