Zenzizenzizenzic

(en.wikipedia.org)

117 points | by gyosifov a day ago ago

34 comments

  • jzer0cool a day ago ago

    Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry is disguise?

    • farmerbb a day ago ago

      I understood that reference.

      • piekvorst 20 hours ago ago

        Not just a Futurama reference

  • marceldegraaf a day ago ago

    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

  • culi a day ago ago

    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.

  • Jblx2 a day ago ago

    I always wondered what the Spice Girls were singing about in that song.

  • momoraul a day ago ago

    Just "zenzi" stacked three times. They really committed to the bit.

    • hun3 a day ago ago

      (zenzi)³

      I mean zenzi-cubic

      • aldanor 16 hours ago ago

        Or cubizenzic?

  • gre a day ago ago
    • epihelix a day ago ago

      Well no, by the same logic it would be quaverquaverquaverquavic.

      A hemidemisemiquaver, while a little scary for the performer, at least makes immediate perfect sense. Unlike that stupid "sixty-fourth note" rubbish. Music is art, not fractions!

      • dhosek a day ago ago

        Fractions are art and man, music relies so much on fractions.

  • gste a day ago ago

    Someone should make a language where every math formula is a word.

    Then give it to an LLM and let it go nuts

    • JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago ago

      This isn’t far off from Gödel’s work.

  • graypegg a day ago ago

    > …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

    • Sparkle-san a day ago ago

      Scrabble only comes with one Z, so some of those are gonna have be sideways N's.

      • gjm11 a day ago ago

        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.

        • dylan604 a day ago ago

          even if you just played the root zenzic would be great score, but again, the solitary z would make a wee bit difficult

    • darth_aardvark a day ago ago

      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.

      • graypegg a day ago ago

        Ah! Wrong on the internet! Oh no!

    • conradludgate a day ago ago

      With one Z tile and 2 blanks...

    • binary132 16 hours ago ago

      This is exactly what first came to my mind as well. Pretty funny scenario to imagine

  • not_a_bot_4sho a day ago ago

    Waiting for an AI startup to create a phononym of this, in the same vein as Google did...

    • dkarl a day ago ago

      I assume it's already trademarked as a pharmaceutical name.

      • Waterluvian a day ago ago

        Kind of! It’s the official patented name for the formulation of the original Powerade. Back then it was known as PowerEight. The recipe hasn’t changed.

        They take the finest electrolytes from whatever side of the salt flats we’re on, distil them twice, then thrice, then once again thrice more. They then rehydrate it, thus infusing it with the pure essence of hydration. They add red dye (for the flavour) and memories of cherry (for the colour) and bottle it. The bottles are then dozenized and loaded onto trucks to be immediately re-homed.

        Learned about all this on late night deep delve Discovery Channel soirée… or maybe it was a fever dream (which has a fascinating origin story as well, but that’s for another time.)

  • tosh a day ago ago

    nb: Robert Recorde also came up with the equals sign as two horizontal parallel lines "=". Yes, that one.

    "bicause noe 2, thynges, can be moare equalle"

    (and helped make + and - signs more popular)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Recorde

    see page 5:

    https://sigapl.org/Articles/Language%20as%20an%20intellectua...

    obligatory mention of Notation as a Tool of Thought

    1979 Turing Award lecture by Ken Iverson

    https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

  • sublinear a day ago ago

    > 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.

  • lbo462 a day ago ago

    That is actually pretty cool

  • AStrangeMorrow a day ago ago

    Someone watched “The rest is Science” I imagine!

    • marcusb a day ago ago

      Or tried that vocabulary estimator that is currently on the front page (it gave me zenzizenizenic in the last section.)

      • AStrangeMorrow a day ago ago

        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.

    • epihelix a day ago ago

      Listened to, I assume you mean?

      (Also, is it just me, or is anyone else mildly annoyed that the cleverly-titled "The rest is history" spawned a heap of meaningless "The rest is ..." siblings. Talk about letting the side down. I'm just waiting for Goal Hanger to recruit a pair of meditation gurus into their podcast stable, to make the "The rest is resting" ...)