Did you know that the longest word in the dictionary is one that describes an illness of the lungs obtained by the inhalation of silica dust? If I remember it properly, i believe its called pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I remembered this with the aid of word morphemes, which are surprisingly useful to recall words and their definitions. Just in case you think it would be awesome to know a word like that, I'll help you remember it using morphemes. I know, its impossible to try and remember the roots of all of these words but, in reality, you have to start someone.
Okay, first: Pneumono - which I know comes from Latin "Pneumon" (like in Pneumonia) and means lungs (which BY THE WAY comes from pneuma, meaning 'air'). Then there's the 'ultra', meaning an extreme of something, this is followed by 'microscopic' meaning- only visible with a microscope (so fundamentally 'tiny'). Next you have the 'silico', which makes you think back to the inhalation of SILICA (think of the Latin origin: SILEX, as in the flint the earlier hominids used to create their primitive artillery, :P. If that's too tough, try to think of 'silic', meaning 'flint'). After this, there's 'volcano', which is pretty self-explanatory. (Still, isn't it so cool that the word volcano takes its root in Roman mythology? (as in Vulcan, the god of fire.) And then theres... coniosis. I don't really have a word storage in my mind that has anything relating to.... coniosis. The only thing I can think of is conus, which I THINK is an anatomical word and means cone or something. Still, I strongly doubt this has anything to o with this word. I think you'll probably jut have to remember it as coniosis. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis- it's pretty simple now isn't it? Personally, if someone used it in a sentence i'd find myself quite impressed by that individual.... or aggravated by their intelligence. Either or, it's still nice working with word morphemes :)
picture courtesy of Deviantart
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