Good day to you, fellow logophiles! Welcome to the very first installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Our first word, rather aptly, is a word describing the length of other words. Today, we are talking about ‘sesquipedalian’.
Sesquipedalian refers to a long or polysyllabic word, or can be used to describe something characterised by long words, or being long-winded. Thus, you could plausibly describe this as a sesquipedalian definition, if I proceeded to take far too long to define the word, expand on its definitions, history, and interpretations, and then further explored unnecessary tangents or examples and stories surrounding the word by perhaps telling you about the time I was in university and had a sesquipedalian professor, who used far too many words to describe quite a simple topic, when all we students wanted to do was gain the necessary knowledge to pass our examinations and then depart swiftly for an alcoholic beverage, and yet, he simply went on and on with no discernible need or purpose. Imagine that.
The literal definition of sesquipedalian from 1610 is a “person or thing a foot and a half long”, from the Latin sesquipedalia; where ‘sesqui’ refers to ‘half as much again’ and the stem of ‘ped’ meaning ‘foot’. Sesquipedalian reached its peak usage in literature in 1865, with a gradual decline, a smaller peak in the late 1890s, and then further decline into the 2000s. Bring it back, say I!
Interestingly, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is one of the longest words in the dictionary — and, in an ironic twist, is the name for a fear of long words. Sesquipedalophobia is another term for the phobia. We hope that today’s discussion has not given you sesquipedalophobia, but rather, made you a sesquipedali-ophile! Okay, we made that up, but you get the idea.
Isn’t language wonderful?
