Long words, old words, wild words and funny words | Whale’s Tales

Published 10:30 am Friday, March 20, 2026

It’s been a while since I’ve written here about the delights and instruction I’ve derived from a lifetime’s fascination with, and study of, words.

Past and present, English and numerous otherwises.

From an Elizabethan word for love, to a 172-letter word for a fricassee in classical Greek (more on that below), to Goethe’s comic phrasing for a certain, silly, 18th-Century pamphleteer and theorist the great German writer satirized in his “Faust,” here are some of the verbal fireworks that have shone upon me.

Let’s start with that Elizabethan word for “love” I mentioned above. Care to guess? How about “poopnoddy”? Hard-to -imagine. Yet, there it is. In Shakespeare nonetheless.

According to one of my former classics professors at the University of Washington — a fact confirmed by “The Guinness Book of World Records” — the longest word ever to appear in literature is a Greek noun for “fricassee” coined by the classical Athenian comic playwright, Aristophanes, in his satirical comedy, “The Ecclesiazusae.”

And here it is: “Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.”

That word lists 17 sweet and sour ingredients, including brains, honey vinegar, fish, pickles, and ouzo. In Greek, the word is 170 letters, but transliterated into English, it is 182 letters.

Try to pronounce it, I double-dog dare you.

Turning to the aforementioned Goethe, the object of his derision, one Friedrich Nikolai, earned literary immortalty by suggesting in an 18th-Century pamphlet that one way to drive away ghosts and specters was to spackle one’s, um, butt with leeches. For that, Goethe dubbed him, “Der Proktophantamist.” Or, as Walter Kaufmann rendered the grand title in his translation of Goethe’s “Faust,” “The Ghost Rumpler.”

Of course, English has its share of words that strike a foreign ear as odd. I once asked a German friend, let’s call him Torsten Hebel for that was his name, what he considered the funniest word in English. Without a moment’s hesitation, he articulated it: “poophead.” Wish I hadn’t asked. From that point on, I was “Poophead,” as in, “Goodnight, Poophead,” and “Would you bring me that script…Poophead?” and “Don’t step in that, Poophead!”

I once read a letter in the opinion column of a local newspaper from a person of British extraction who poked fun at us Americans for our town names, like “Humptulips” and “Anklescratch.” I don’t remember precisely how one particular American writer memorably responded, but it went something like this: “Dear Sir: I don’t believe that a fellow who comes from a country with villages named ‘Great Snoring,’ and ‘Snork on the Tiggle’ (sic) has much room to talk.”

Anyway, I find vocabulary such a rich field. I will likely visit the subject again one day in this column. Let me know your thinkings.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.