Zenzizenzizenzic

View article

114 points by gyosifov 20 hours ago on hackernews | 34 comments

not_a_bot_4sho | 20 hours ago

Waiting for an AI startup to create a phononym of this, in the same vein as Google did...

dkarl | 17 hours ago

I assume it's already trademarked as a pharmaceutical name.

: Waterluvian | 13 hours ago
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.)

graypegg | 20 hours ago

> …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

Sparkle-san | 20 hours ago

Scrabble only comes with one Z, so some of those are gonna have be sideways N's.

gjm11 | 19 hours ago

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.

: dylan604 | 19 hours ago
even if you just played the root zenzic would be great score, but again, the solitary z would make a wee bit difficult

conradludgate | 20 hours ago

With one Z tile and 2 blanks...

darth_aardvark | 20 hours ago

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.

: graypegg | 17 hours ago
Ah! Wrong on the internet! Oh no!

binary132 | 4 hours ago

This is exactly what first came to my mind as well. Pretty funny scenario to imagine

lbo462 | 20 hours ago

That is actually pretty cool

AStrangeMorrow | 20 hours ago

Someone watched “The rest is Science” I imagine!

marcusb | 19 hours ago

Or tried that vocabulary estimator that is currently on the front page (it gave me zenzizenizenic in the last section.)

: AStrangeMorrow | 16 hours ago
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.

epihelix | 13 hours ago

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" ...)

marceldegraaf | 20 hours ago

Ah, I see someone has listened to "The Rest is Science" recently. Great podcast with Michael Stevens (VSauce) and Hannah Fry (the mathematician)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

flyingcircus3 | 20 hours ago

Actually, its just one of the 170k English words we all totally already knew this morning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586

: nkrisc | 18 hours ago
Which was also heavily featured on the podcast mentioned.

sublinear | 20 hours ago

> 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.

momoraul | 19 hours ago

Just "zenzi" stacked three times. They really committed to the bit.

hun3 | 12 hours ago

(zenzi)³

I mean zenzi-cubic

: aldanor | 4 hours ago
Or cubizenzic?

culi | 19 hours ago

Funny that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzic

redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power

I supposed the 16th power would then be Zenzizenzizenzizenzic and so forth.

Jblx2 | 19 hours ago

I always wondered what the Spice Girls were singing about in that song.

gre | 16 hours ago

hemidemisemiquaver vibes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixty-fourth_note

epihelix | 13 hours ago

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!