Floccinaucinihilipilification
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant, of having no value or being worthless. countable, humorous, often, uncountable
"I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money."
Example
More examples"Denying the sesquipedalian is but mere floccinaucinihilipilification."
Etymology
From Latin floccus (“a wisp”) + naucum (“a trifle”) + nihilum (“nothing”) + pilus (“a hair”) + -fication. A jocular coinage, apparently by pupils at Eton College, combining a number of Latin word stems. The word was inspired by a line present in various editions of William Lily's (c. 1468–1522) Latin grammars published around the 17th–19th centuries (including the Eton Latin Grammar), in which some nouns commonly used in the genitive case with some verbs like pendo and facio are listed, which express evaluating something as worthless or as previously mentioned; see the reference.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.