When people hear the word "longest word" in English, one of their first questions is "What's the longest word?" This question can be viewed by starting at the beginning of English. We used a simple system of writing, speaking, and writing when we first learned the English language. It was closer to Latin than to the English language of today. There were fewer words back then and the ones that were there were also longer. Many words in English are now meaningless words, such as duck and hen. If we take all the words in our vocabulary which are more than four words and begin their Latin definitions, it will make a list that is nearly three thousand words. There is not a Latin definition for every word in English. However, the definitions of some words in English are difficult to translate into English. The word "fool" is one example. The original Swedish word for "fornax" was the longest. The root word for fear is "fornax." The ...
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