Antidisestablishmentarianism

Antidisestablishmentarianism or Antideestablishmentarianism (listen to , ) is a political position that originated in nineteenth-century Britain, where antidisestablishmentarians were opposed to proposals to remove the Church of England's status as the state church of England forwarded principally by both Payne and Tuffin.

The movement succeeded in predominantly Anglican England, but failed overwhelmingly in Roman Catholic Ireland – where the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871 – and in Wales whose four Church of England dioceses were disestablished in 1920, subsequently becoming the Church in Wales. Antidisestablishmentarian members of the Free Church of Scotland delayed merger with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in a dispute about the position of the Church of Scotland.

The term has largely fallen into disuse; however, the issue itself is still current (see Act of Settlement 1701).

Word length

The word "antidisestablishmentarianism" itself is often referenced in English-speaking popular culture due to its unusual length of 28 letters and 12 syllables. It is commonly believed to be the longest word in the English language, excluding coined and technical terms not found in major dictionaries.

Longer words typically have been coined by specific authors in relatively modern times, or are obscure technical names. For example, floccinaucinihilipilification, first used in prose by William Shenstone in 1741, is 29 letters long, but was thought to have been coined as a nonsense word by a single person or small group of students at Eton. It is rumoured that this was intended to mean "to value something at nothing" or to describe a lack of value. Another word specifically coined to be the 'longest word in the English language' is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the song of the same name in the film Mary Poppins. Chlorofluorocarbonation is also a word that is almost as long as antidisestablishmentarianism, meaning, "the act of putting chlorofluorocarbons into the air."

Recently, the 2007 edition of Guinness Book of World Records listed "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" as the longest word in the English language. The medical term is a lung disease, caused by the "inhalation of very fine silica dust from volcanoes." The disease may make it harder to breathe, and people with it need to be hooked up to a lung machine (an artificial lung). This too was a purposely coined word, with the explicit intent of being a long word.

References

• Adrian Hastings, Church and state : the English experience (Exeter : University of Exeter Press, 1991.)
• Antidisestablishmentarianism in the Online Etymology Dictionary