Sesquipedalian

Hannah McCall 12 Comments

Here’s a new type of interesting word for this blog – a word that is autological. Autological words are members of or have features of the category they describe. They have or represent the property they denote.

Sesquipedalian means ‘having many syllables’. It can also be used to describe something as given to using long words or being long-winded.

Its origin is mid 17th century, from the Latin sesquipedalis meaning ‘a foot and a half long’.

12 thoughts on “Sesquipedalian”

  2. Two new pieces of information here! Fascinating. I can’t say sesquipedalian very well, but it’s something to work at! 🙂

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  3. This cleared up a mystery. Back in the 1960s-1970s I used to listen to a BBC Radio celebrity panel game called ‘Many Slip’. One of the rounds was entitled Mrs Sesquipedalian- a fictional ‘Society Lady’. The accounts of her activities contained several polysyllabic words. Panel members were to identify the definition and maybe challenge the context. Know I know how her name was spelt and the definition! Thanks

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    • Ah, that’s very interesting! It sounds like the sort of thing I would have enjoyed listening to. Thank you. (By the way, you posted two similar versions of this comment – let me know if you want me to approve the other one or edit this one at all.)

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      • Sorry about the two other comments. My computer has been painfully slow and quirky of late, and this is another case of it not shown what is there (hard drive I fear is on its way out- leastways that’s what someone wiser than me figures)- so at the time I thought (a) One had been deleted and (b) Not been posted.

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