Last weekend, my daughter and I ran up to my parent’s house to see my brother Kurt and his fiancé, Kurt’s three kids, and his oldest daughter’s boyfriend, who were all in from Ohio to attend a graduation party for a friend’s daughter.

As we sat around the kitchen table, digesting an obscene amount of pizza, the conversation drifted from college psychology classes to the many different types of phobias there are.

“Did you know the word for the fear of long words is actually one of the longest words?” my nephew Zac said. “It starts out hippo-something.”

Zac had unknowingly provided Celeste with the opportunity of a lifetime. 

“Oh, you mean hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia?” my just-out-of sixth grader casually said.

All heads turned her way.

“Say that again,” my dad said.

“Hip-po-pot-o-mon-stro-ses-quip-e-dalio-pho-bia,” said Celeste.

With few opportunities to smoothly drop her favorite word into conversation, I could tell she was relishing each delicious syllable.

“It means the fear of extremely long words,” she said.

Celeste had picked up the word from her friend, Caroline Evans, when she’d spent the night at our house a month or two ago. There is little that charms our family of word geeks more than a guest who uses a word like hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

When researching the word, I learned there’s some dispute over the spelling, with a few pundits claiming it’s often deliberately misspelled to make the word even longer.

According to the online Wiktionary, “hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian is an extension of sesquipedalian with monstrum ‘monster’ and a truncated, misspelled form of hippopotamus, intended to exaggerate the length of the word itself and the idea of the size of the words being feared; combined with phobia.”

When I was in middle school (called junior high then), I learned the word antidisestablishmentarianism with the hopes that I’d be able to work it into conversation with my history teacher, but never had the chance. (These days, I feel blessed when I manage to retain a person’s name for longer than a minute before it vanishes into the mystical Neverland that exists between my left ear and my right.)

I find it heartening, though, that this word for the fear of long words is something that’s come up with kids here in Charleston as well as teenagers living in bad-driver country, where my nephew resides.

And I like that my girl is brave enough not to be afraid of long words.

Although I wonder if there’s a word for those who fear having to spell it.

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