Why does my spellchecker vindicate "floccinaucinihilipilification"?

I have heard of this word as cited to contain the most i's of all English words. I had never heard of it before, but when I copied and pasted it into my email program, lo and behold, the picky spellchecker didn't bat an eyelid!

Has anyone ever seriously used this word, or any other word of comparable length? How in the world did my spellchecker know about a word nobody will ever use?

Solution 1:

Your spellchecker didn't bat an eyelid because it is simply comparing that word to a list of known properly-spelled words. Despite there being about a quarter-million words in the English language, plus about another 50,000 proper nouns which are commonly included in spelling dictionaries and about another 50,000 "common" technical terms, when properly sorted and indexed it is trivial for a computer to perform a check of each word against this list in real time. On the flip side of that coin, the spell-checker feature of whatever application you use would take a severe credibility hit if the user entered a known good word that the dictionary didn't know about and marked as incorrectly spelled. So, to be on the safe side, the spell checker developers included a dictionary of every word and term, however unlikely the user is to ever type that word.

Solution 2:

Wiktionary defines it as:

A jocular coinage, apparently by students at Eton, combining a number of roughly synonymous Latin stems. Latin flocci, from floccus, a wisp or piece of wool + nauci, from naucum, a trifle + nihili, from the Latin pronoun, nihil (“nothing”) + pili, from pilus, a hair, something insignificant (all therefore having the sense of "pettiness" or "nothing") + -fication. "Flocci non facio" was a Latin expression of indifference, literally "I do not make a straw of...".

As for the reason for it being introduced in your spellchecker... well... Easter egg?

EDIT: actually floccinaucinihilipilification is listed in the OED, with examples dating back to the 18th century. So, well, it's a rare English word and was probably dumped in the spellchecker dictionary from a big list of words, used or not.

Solution 3:

It's not as if nobody has ever used it. Look, we're using it now! It's in all of my larger dictionaries, too.

And here's a Google NGram showing it's appeared in print since around 1920:

So even if most of the mentions of the word are meta-discussions like this one, it still exists in English. It doesn't fall trippingly off the tongue, and I've never heard it at, say, a garden party. Yet it exists, and you can thank your spellchecker for at least having a sense of completeness as well as (possibly) a sense of humor.