Names for the number 0 in English when the rifle caliber .30-06 Springfield (introduced in 1906) is accordingly referred to by the name "thirty-aught-six". The words "nought" and "naught" are spelling variants. They are, according to H. W. Fowler, not a modern accident as might be thought, but have descended that way from Old English. There is a distinction in British English between the two, but it is not one that is universally recognized. This distinction is that "nought" is primarily used in a literal arithmetic sense, where the number 0 is straightforwardly meant, whereas "naught" is used in poetical and rhetorical senses, where "nothing" could equally
Longest word in English likely to be encountered in general text are "deinstitutionalization" and "counterrevolutionaries", with 22 letters each. A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is "uncharacteristically", at 20 letters. The word "internationalization" is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last. In his play "Assemblywomen" ("Ecclesiazousae"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients: Henry Carey's farce