This beautiful oddity comes by way of Michael Quinon’s World Wide Words. Coined by the Welsh mathametician Robert Recorde in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte, it means the eighth power of a number. So the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 would be 256. This word, which would have made of Lewis Carroll (of Jabberwocky fame) and Edgar Allan Poe (of tintinnabulation fame) leap for joy, never managed to make it’s way into the English lexicon. It went the way of it’s predecessor zenzic (a word borrowed from German meaning the squared power of a number) and vanished into history. It is also the only word in the English language to contain six Zs, according to this page.
While The Whetstone of Witte failed to launch zenzizenzizenzic into the stratosphere of mathamatical language, Recorde’s book did have lasting influence that every elementary student still uses, the equals sign, “=”.
Interestingly, there is also an unusual website Zenzizenzizenzic.com by Justin Webb where one can navigate through a maze to find various links, or get lost in dead ends.
