Piste Piste A piste () is a marked ski run or path down a mountain for snow skiing, snowboarding, or other mountain sports. This European term is French ("trail", "track") and synonymous with 'trail', 'slope', or 'groomed run' in North America. The word is pronounced using a long "e" sound (e.g. rhymes with "beast"). Increasingly, North Americans employ its common European antonym, 'off piste', to describe backcountry skiing, especially when referring to skiing outside officially approved areas of a ski resort. Pistes are usually maintained using tracked vehicles known as snowcats to compact or "groom" the snow to even out trail
Longest word in French Longest word in French This article lists some of the longest words in the French language. The longest word listed below, "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie" (36 letters) is the fear (or phobia) of long words. The word is formed from the Latin word "sesquipedalia" (singular "sesquipedalis"), which the Ancient Roman poet Horace used in "Ars Poetica" to describe excessively long words; literally, it means "a foot-and-a-half long". The length of the word "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie" is embellished with the prefix "hippopotomonstro" ("monster hippopotamus"), which is a characterisation of the feared words. Like the other phobias in the list, "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie" can be pluralised by adding the