Nerve gas, Weapon of chemical warfare that affects the transmission of nerve impulses through the nervous system.
According to Ryan Compton's Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word Infinite Jest. 10. 11. n+1 has a neat story about where the name for Michael Pemulis, Hal's drug-dealing friend at Enfield Tennis Academy, came from.
Length depends a lot on genre, style, and the story to be told. Frothy mysteries by established authors, like The Cat Who series by Lilian Jackson Braun can be as short as 200 pages or about 50,000 words. Her earlier books in the series were closer to 300 pages (75,000 words).