6/19/2026 at 9:49:44 PM
by gyosifov
6/19/2026 at 10:18:05 PM
Ah, I see someone has listened to "The Rest is Science" recently. Great podcast with Michael Stevens (VSauce) and Hannah Fry (the mathematician)by marceldegraaf
6/19/2026 at 10:33:42 PM
Actually, its just one of the 170k English words we all totally already knew this morning.by flyingcircus3
6/20/2026 at 12:03:10 AM
Which was also heavily featured on the podcast mentioned.by nkrisc
6/19/2026 at 11:09:15 PM
Funny that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzicredirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power
I supposed the 16th power would then be Zenzizenzizenzizenzic and so forth.
by culi
6/20/2026 at 2:11:22 AM
Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry is disguise?by jzer0cool
6/20/2026 at 4:24:20 AM
I understood that reference.by farmerbb
6/19/2026 at 11:36:21 PM
I always wondered what the Spice Girls were singing about in that song.by Jblx2
6/19/2026 at 10:46:10 PM
Just "zenzi" stacked three times. They really committed to the bit.by momoraul
6/20/2026 at 5:46:53 AM
(zenzi)³I mean zenzi-cubic
by hun3
6/20/2026 at 6:34:03 AM
Someone should make a language where every math formula is a word.Then give it to an LLM and let it go nuts
by gste
6/19/2026 at 10:23:47 PM
> 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.
by sublinear
6/20/2026 at 6:15:05 AM
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...
by tosh
6/20/2026 at 1:42:48 AM
hemidemisemiquaver vibesby gre
6/20/2026 at 5:08:47 AM
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!
by epihelix
6/20/2026 at 5:57:13 AM
Fractions are art and man, music relies so much on fractions.by dhosek
6/19/2026 at 10:02:16 PM
Waiting for an AI startup to create a phononym of this, in the same vein as Google did...by not_a_bot_4sho
6/20/2026 at 12:49:47 AM
I assume it's already trademarked as a pharmaceutical name.by dkarl
6/20/2026 at 5:12:18 AM
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.)
by Waterluvian
6/19/2026 at 10:03:56 PM
> …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
by graypegg
6/19/2026 at 10:08:18 PM
Scrabble only comes with one Z, so some of those are gonna have be sideways N's.by Sparkle-san
6/19/2026 at 10:41:32 PM
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.by gjm11
6/19/2026 at 11:05:37 PM
even if you just played the root zenzic would be great score, but again, the solitary z would make a wee bit difficultby dylan604
6/19/2026 at 10:12:49 PM
With one Z tile and 2 blanks...by conradludgate
6/19/2026 at 10:26:31 PM
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.by darth_aardvark
6/20/2026 at 12:55:21 AM
Ah! Wrong on the internet! Oh no!by graypegg
6/19/2026 at 10:07:51 PM
That is actually pretty coolby lbo462
6/19/2026 at 10:17:38 PM
Someone watched “The rest is Science” I imagine!by AStrangeMorrow
6/19/2026 at 11:11:55 PM
Or tried that vocabulary estimator that is currently on the front page (it gave me zenzizenizenic in the last section.)by marcusb
6/20/2026 at 2:26:11 AM
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.
by AStrangeMorrow
6/20/2026 at 5:16:29 AM
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" ...)
by epihelix