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The following sentence won a prize offered in England for the longest twelve-word telegram: “Administrator-General’s counter-revolutionary intercommunications uncircumstantiated. Quartermaster-General’s disproportionableness characteristically contra-distinguished unconstitutionalist’s incomprehensibilities.” It is said that the telegraph authorities accepted it as a despatch of twelve words.

The statement, upon the publication of a new English dictionary, that the longest word in the language is “disproportionableness” was met by pointing to a still longer word employed by the Parnellites at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in 1S71,—“disestablishmentarianism,” which found its way into the House of Commons, and another, quoted from a theological work,—“anthropomorphologically.” These are likely to hold the record, at least outside of the names of chemical compounds and their derivatives, such as trioxymethylanthraquinonic, or dichlorhydroquinonedisulphonic, which outstrip all reckoning.

There is an old farce called “Cryptochonchoidsyphonostomata” which was revived by Mr. Charles Collette, a London actor, several years ago, and was extensively advertised in the London press, to the dismay of the compositors and proof-readers.

One of the funniest long words is necrobioneopaleonthydrockthonanthropopithekology. That, of course, is not an English word, though it is in an English book,—Kingsley’s “Water Babies.” It means the science of life and death of man and monkeys in by-gone times, as well as one can make it out. It is a word invented by Kingsley.

The clown Costard, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, addressing the schoolmaster, says, “Thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.”

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Mad Lover, the Fool says,—

“The iron age returned to Erebus,

And Honorificabilitudinitatibus

Thrust out the kingdom by the head and shoulders.”

Referring to Shakespeare’s appropriation of this ponderous word, which first appeared in a volume entitled “The Complaynt of Scotland,” published at St. Andrew’s in 1548, a commentator says,—

“The splendid procession-word honorificabilitudinitatibus has been pressed into the service of the Baconian theory as containing the cipher initiohi ludi Fr. Bacona, or some other silly trash. The word was no doubt a stock example of the longest Latin word, as the Aristophanic compound ὀρθοφοιτοσυχοφαντοδιχοταλαιπωροι is of the longest Greek word, and was very probably a reminiscence of Shakespeare’s school-days, as the distich

Conturbabantur Constantinopolitani

Innumerabilibus sollicitudinibus

is of our own.”