The English name for 13,000,000,000,000,000,003,019,000,000,000, THIRTEEN NONILLION THREE TRILLION NINETEEN BILLION, is spelled with 1 B, 2 Hs, 3 Rs, 4 Os, 5 Ts, 6 Ls, 7 Es, 8 Is, and 9 Ns.
(Thanks, David.)
Language
Showing and Telling
An honest number is a number n that can be described using exactly n letters. For example, 8 can be described as TWO CUBED, and 11 as TWO PLUS NINE.
In 2003, Bill Clagett found that
EIGHTEENTH ROOT OF EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR QUATTUORDECILLION THREE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR TREDECILLION SIX HUNDRED EIGHTY DUODECILLION EIGHT HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX UNDECILLION SIX HUNDRED FIFTY-THREE DECILLION SIX HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN NONILLION ONE HUNDRED THREE OCTILLION NINETY SEPTILLION NINE HUNDRED EIGHTY-TWO SEXTILLION FIVE HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE QUINTILLION FOUR HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT QUADRILLION SEVEN HUNDRED NINETY-FOUR TRILLION NINE HUNDRED THIRTEEN BILLION FOUR HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO MILLION NINE HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE THOUSAND EIGHTY-ONE
contains 461 letters.
More Postal Torture
Addressing communications to the post just for the pleasure of seeing whether the hard-worked authorities will be equal to deciphering them is perhaps not very considerate, but the officials are so very rarely found at fault that the laugh is almost always on their side. This phonographic postcard was delivered at the house of Mr. E.H. King, of Belle View House, Richmond, Surrey, who sent us the card within an hour and a half after he had posted it to himself locally.
That’s from the Strand, February 1899. “Phonographic” refers to a system of phonetic shorthand; this one must have been fairly well known if the G.P.O. deciphered it so quickly. Charles Dickens had to learn an early alphabetical shorthand for his work as a journalist; he adapted this later into a system of his own, some of which remains undeciphered.
In a Word
zetetic
adj. proceeding by inquiry
astucious
adj. subtle; cunning; astute
consectary
adj. following logically
‘Who did you pass on the road?’ the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay.
‘Nobody,’ said the Messenger.
‘Quite right,’ said the King: ‘this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.’
‘I do my best,’ the Messenger said in a sulky tone. ‘I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do!’
‘He can’t do that,’ said the King, ‘or else he’d have been here first.’
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
Doubly True
Leonard J. Gordon discovered this remarkable cryptarithm in 1990 — each letter corresponds to a digit:
NINE × FOUR + FIVE = FORTYONE
9895 × 3074 + 3865 = 30421095
(Leonard J. Gordon, “Literary Cryptarithmetic by Computer,” Word Ways 23:2 [May 1990], 67-70.)
Turnabout
-ESS changes POET to POETESS, -ETTE changes BACHELOR to BACHELORETTE, -INA changes CZAR to CZARINA, and -INE changes HERO to HEROINE. What suffix changes a word from feminine to masculine?
In Other Words
Lexicon Recentis Latinitas, published by the Vatican, invents Latin versions of modern words and phrases, so students can refer to items that didn’t exist in the ancient world:
bestseller: liber maxime divenditus
car wash: autocinetorum lavatrix
Christmas tree: arbor natalicia
disc brakes: sufflamen disci forma
dishwasher: escariorum lavator
to flirt: lusorie amare
leased property: locatio in emptionem convertibilis
pinball machine: sphaeriludium electricum nomismate actum
refrigerator: cella frigorifera
to slack off on the job: neglegenter operor
television: instrumentum televisificum
traffic jam: fluxus interclusio
washing machine: machina linteorum lavatoria
These examples are from a selection published in 1991 in Harper’s, which said that 75 percent of the 18,000 entries in that year’s edition were terms that had never had Latin equivalents. I can’t find the whole book, but the Vatican website offers an Italian-Latin glossary with some entries in English (hot pants are brevíssimae bracae femíneae).
Second Senses
Entries from the Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary:
beehive: what Australian teachers tell you to do
blistering: someone you enjoy calling on the phone
cannelloni: Scots refusal to give one an overdraft
cherish: rather like a chair
colliery: sort of like a collie but even more so
emboss: to promote to the top
female: chemical name for Iron Man
flatulence: an emergency vehicle that picks you up after you have been run over by a steamroller
Icelander: to tell lies about Apple
ivy: the Roman for four
lamb shank: Sean Connery’s sheep has drowned
laundress: grass skirt
pastrami: the art of meat folding
quick: noise made by a New Zealand duck
splint: to run very fast with a broken leg
Venezuela: a gondola with a harpoon
wisteria: a nostalgic form of panic
xylophone: the Greek goddess of Scrabble
A foible is “something coughed up by a New York cat.”
A Pretty Find
Write the word CESAROLITE in a circle and then trace out the letters in its anagram ESOTERICAL — the result is a perfect 10-pointed star:
Only 5.7 percent of anagrams in English are “maximally shuffled,” meaning that no letter retains its original neighbors. And even those rarely produce such pleasing symmetry when they’re diagramed like this. This is the largest “perfect” star anagram found in a systematic search by Jason Parker and Dan Barker; for more, see the link below.
(Jason Parker and Dan Barker, “Star Anagram Detection and Classification,” Recreational Mathematics Magazine 12:20 [June 2025], 19-40.)
Hypertension
New English verb tenses, offered by David Morice in a November 1986 Word Ways article:
Future past perfect: I will have had walked
Progressive conditional: I would have should have been walking
Future present past: He will does walked
Double future: He will will walk
Unconditional present: He could can walk
Obsessive progressive: He is being doing walking
Refractive future perfect: He did will was have walked
Superjunctive: He might be having been about to be walking
The Tortoise stepped ever so carefully across the finish line, just a moment before the Hare would have been about to be going to hop across it himself. ‘I won!’ she said. The Hare paused a moment, then replied, ‘Yes, Ms. Tortoise, in the next decade you will have been about to be going to be used to be having been doing being the winner of this race, but tomorrow we’ll have to do it again, for it’s two out of three, ma’am.’