Badgers wordsmith Hayes, with Dictionary.com, resumes sesquipedalian quest

Published Jun. 4, 2015 3:20 p.m. ET

share

facebookxredditlink

foxsports

You know that huge, heavy, dust-covered book in your parents' house that has all those words and definitions in it? Well, we don't know what a book is, either, but apparently that word-defining thing is called a dictionary, and luckily they put it on the Internet for us.

And good thing, too, because it's allowed Badgers basketball player Nigel Hayes and his everlasting lexicological love affair to provide basketball -- and language -- fans endless entertainment, assuming (as we do) that the dictionary has no end and that American humans are entertained by obscure words.

Every day (or, daily), the enterprising vocabulists at Dictionary.com feature a Word of the Day on their site's home page, complete with meaning and pronunciation. It's a fun way to learn new stuff and improve talking good, and you can sign up to have the word emailed to you.

But you could also just follow Hayes.

You remember the Badgers' rising-junior forward, who emerged last season as one of the most important and enjoyable players on a team filled with elite talent and engaging personalities. He charmed fans, captivated media and consternated press-conference transcribers with his sesquipedalian proclivities during the Badgers' NCAA tournament run, which ended with a loss to Duke in the national championship game. Now, after a bit of a hiatus -- his last Twitter interaction with Dictionary.com before Thursday was on May 13 -- Hayes has resumed his quest to confuse, amuse, enlighten or whatever it is that he's doing with these long, weird words.

On Thursday, Dictionary.com tweeted a thank-you to Hayes for selecting the word of the day. Hayes confirmed on Twitter that he had picked floccinaucinihilipilification, which is a Latin-formed noun defined as "the estimation of something as valueless." He later asked his followers to submit videos of themselves trying to pronounce the 12-syllable mouthful, which is considered the longest non-technical word in major dictionaries. Hayes also posted a video of himself saying the rare word, whose usage has been recorded as early as 1741, and called his efforts a "PSA on behalf of my guys at @dictionarycom."

According to those guys, floccinaucinihilipilification is encountered mainly as an example of one of the longest words in the English language. At 29 letters, it is one character lengthier than antidisestablishmentarianism, a non-coined term for a 19th-century British political position and another word used by Hayes during the tournament. Of course, the longest word is 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, but that doesn't really count because, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it's a technical term (referring to a lung disease) and "an artificial long word." And if you want to advocate the worthiness of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, at 34 letters, then you should just stop watching Mary Poppins and turn on some college basketball, where they use real words.

Hayes, who averaged 12.4 points and 6.2 rebounds last year, will be one of the Badgers' key players next season and could potentially play in the NBA. He has previously touted the importance of his schooling. Given a significant proposed budget cut to the University of Wisconsin system currently being weighed, perhaps the wordsmith's fellow classmates would say that some in the state government view their college education with a certain level of floccinaucinihilipilification.

Follow James Carlton on Twitter

share