First appearing in English about the time of Shakespeare, what word means foppish, or, later, fabricated or tricked out?
Longest word in English Longest word in English The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared. In addition to words derived naturally from the language's roots (without any known intentional invention), English allows new words to be formed by coinage and construction; place names may be considered words; technical terms may be arbitrarily long. Length may be understood in terms of orthography and number of written letters, or (less commonly) phonology and the number of phonemes. The longest word in any of the
Controversies about the word "niggardly" Controversies about the word "niggardly" In the United States, there have been several controversies concerning the word "niggardly", an adjective meaning "stingy" or "miserly", because of its phonetic similarity to the racial slur "nigger". Etymologically, the two words are unrelated. "Niggardly" (noun: "niggard") is an adjective meaning "stingy" or "miserly". It can be traced back at least to the Middle English word ', which has the same meaning, and is related to the Old Norse verb ', which means "to fuss about small matters". "Nigger", a racial epithet in English, derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word ', meaning "black", and the