Word Oddities
From a wondrous website about words comes –
- “It is said that no word rhymes with ORANGE. There is a musical recording Rhymes With Orange by Mario Grigorov. There is a comic strip with the same name by Hillary Price. Witchiepoo sang There Ain’t No Rhyme for Oranges on H. R. Pufnstuf. Glenn Anderson reports a Canadian band called Rhymes With Orange had two hit recordings, Marvin and Toy Trains.
However, BLORENGE (a 1,833 ft. hill near Abergavenny, Wales) is given in O. V. Michaelsen’s book Words At Play.
SET is the word with the longest entry in the OED and W3. In the OED2, the verb set has over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words.
PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS (45 letters; a lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles) is the longest word in any English-language dictionary.
The following appeared in a post in alt.usage.english:
I conjecture that this “word” was coined by word puzzlers, who then worked assiduously to get it into the major unabridged dictionaries (perhaps with a wink from the editors?) to put an end to the endless squabbling about what is the longest word.”
Lots more fun stuff on the site too!