Floccinaucinihilipilification

Weird Word of The Week: Floccinaucinihilipilification -the action or habit of judging something to be worthless.

Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant “of little or no value”. In order, those were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version, but I digress). As a learned joke, somebody put all four of these together and then stuck –fication on the end to make a noun for the act of deciding that something is totally and absolutely valueless (a verb, floccinaucinihilipilificate, to judge a thing to be valueless, could also be constructed, but hardly anybody ever does). The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: “I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money