Thursday, February 21, 2008

word of the eighth day

For no good reason (nor do I have a good reason for still being awake), I came across the word zenzizenzizenzic. As a service to those who collect such words (you know who you are), I now make it available to you. If you don’t want to read the essay I linked to, then I’ll sum up: it means the eighth power of a number; it’s so antiquated that it only has one entry in the OED (from 1557); and its root is “zenzic”, meaning “squared”, which comes from the Latin “census”, through German, as a translation from Arabic, with an implication of area (the way one measures property).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am such a person! Thank you!

Although, it is really much more fun if you can use fun words like that randomly in a sentence during the day (but not so random that it is a complete non sequitor). I'm not sure how I would fit that in today in conversation with my spouse or at the office (non-profit charity)...without it being completely out of sync with everything else. ;)

Anonymous said...

Yes I did just use "fun" twice in a sentence. Obviously I must collect more words meaning "fun". Dang it.