Everything about Antidisestablishmentarianism totally explained
Antidisestablishmentarianism (listen to, ) is a political position that originated in
nineteenth-century Britain, where antidisestablishmentarians were opposed to proposals to remove the
Church of England's status as the
state church of
England forwarded principally by both Payne and Tuffin.
The movement succeeded in predominantly
Anglican England, but failed overwhelmingly in
Roman Catholic Ireland – where the
Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871 – and in
Wales whose
Church of Wales was disestablished in 1920. Antidisestablishmentarian members of the
Free Church of Scotland delayed merger with the
United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in a dispute about the position of the
Church of Scotland.
The term has largely fallen into disuse, although the issue itself is still current (see
Act of Settlement 1701).
Word length
The word "antidisestablishmentarianism" itself is often referenced in English-speaking popular culture due to its unusual length of 28 letters and 12 syllables. It is commonly known as the
longest word in the English language, excluding coined and technical terms not found in major dictionaries.
Longer words typically have been coined by specific authors in relatively modern times, or are obscure technical names. For example,
floccinaucinihilipilification, first used in prose by William Shenstone in 1741, is 29 letters long, but was thought to have been coined as a nonsense word by a single person or small group of students at
Eton. It is rumoured that this was intended to mean "to value something at nothing" or to describe a lack of value. Another word specifically coined to be the 'longest word in the English language' is
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the song of the same name in
the film Mary Poppins. Chlorofluorocarbonated is also a word that's almost as long as antidisestablishmentarianism, meaning, "the act of putting
chlorofluorocarbons into the air."
Recently, the 2007 edition of Guinness Book of World Records listed "
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" as the longest word in the English language. The medical term is a lung disease, caused by the "inhalation of very fine silica dust from volcanos." The disease may make it harder to breathe, and people with it need to be hooked up to a lung machine (an artificial lung). This too was a purposely coined word, with the explicit intent of being a long word.
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Further Information
Get more info on 'Antidisestablishmentarianism'.
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