Zenzizenzizenzic
78 points
5 hours ago
| 11 comments
| en.wikipedia.org
| HN
marceldegraaf
4 hours ago
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Ah, I see someone has listened to "The Rest is Science" recently. Great podcast with Michael Stevens (VSauce) and Hannah Fry (the mathematician)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

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flyingcircus3
4 hours ago
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Actually, its just one of the 170k English words we all totally already knew this morning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586

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nkrisc
3 hours ago
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Which was also heavily featured on the podcast mentioned.
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culi
3 hours ago
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Funny that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzic

redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power

I supposed the 16th power would then be Zenzizenzizenzizenzic and so forth.

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Jblx2
3 hours ago
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I always wondered what the Spice Girls were singing about in that song.
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momoraul
4 hours ago
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Just "zenzi" stacked three times. They really committed to the bit.
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jzer0cool
54 minutes ago
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Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry is disguise?
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gre
1 hour ago
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sublinear
4 hours ago
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> dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers ... he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly".

This is a great example of why bad naming conventions are a "smell". It strongly implies that the solution does not yet fully understand the problem it's trying to solve.

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not_a_bot_4sho
5 hours ago
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Waiting for an AI startup to create a phononym of this, in the same vein as Google did...
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dkarl
2 hours ago
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I assume it's already trademarked as a pharmaceutical name.
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graypegg
5 hours ago
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> …it survives as a linguistic oddity: zenzizenzizenzic has more Zs than any other word in the OED.

I am an absolutely garbage scrabble player, but I will be keeping this gem in my back pocket… probably a rare case to play it though haha

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Sparkle-san
4 hours ago
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Scrabble only comes with one Z, so some of those are gonna have be sideways N's.
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gjm11
4 hours ago
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Also, a Scrabble board is 15 squares across and ZENZIZENZIZENZIC is 16 letters, so even with a Scrabble set with extra Zs or blanks you couldn't ever play it.
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dylan604
4 hours ago
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even if you just played the root zenzic would be great score, but again, the solitary z would make a wee bit difficult
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conradludgate
4 hours ago
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With one Z tile and 2 blanks...
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darth_aardvark
4 hours ago
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In addition to the Z's everyone else pointed out, Scrabble boards are 15 tiles across. This is 16 letters. You fool. You utter gumdrop.
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graypegg
2 hours ago
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Ah! Wrong on the internet! Oh no!
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lbo462
4 hours ago
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That is actually pretty cool
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AStrangeMorrow
4 hours ago
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Someone watched “The rest is Science” I imagine!
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marcusb
3 hours ago
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Or tried that vocabulary estimator that is currently on the front page (it gave me zenzizenizenic in the last section.)
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AStrangeMorrow
39 minutes ago
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Yes possible. But really that video of them features the word prominently (even on the thumbnail) AND that vocabulary estimation website. The video/podcast is just slightly over a week old.

Anyway doesn’t really matter, it was more to see if anyone else was a listener of that podcast.

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