The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
Antidisestablishmentarianism2025 Jan 11
When I was a kid, my mother told me the longest English word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She didn't tell me what it meant, because that didn't matter to her, and if she told me where she herself learned this factoid, I've long since forgotten. My mother loved trivia for trivia's sake.
The word is weird enough that it actually has two different pages on the big wiki, one explaining the word itself and one for what is represents: opposing the separation of church and state. But as some other anonymous wikipedian once wrote on the page for the longest word in English, "The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of 'word' and of length," and, being wikipedia, the page's first entry is some chemical nomenclature 189,819 letters long and comes with the helpful note "whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed." Well, no shit. There's a lot of weird technical and nonsense words contending to be longest on the list, because language nerds are like that, but down the page, it is pointed out that the longest non-weird words a person is likely to encounter are "deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each" (although I can't help but notice my browser's spell check balks at the former).
So what's the deal with antidisestablishmentarianism, why did my mother know this random word? I can only guess, but this 2009 Old Time Radio Bulletin post has a clue:
Gloria Lockerman first appeared on The $64,000 Question on August 17, 1955. The nation sat enthralled as the 12-year-old [black] schoolgirl from Baltimore spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” correctly on America’s most popular TV quiz show. On the morning after Gloria got the spelling correct, “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the most-uttered word in every office, factory and playground in the United States. ...
In 1987, the Free-Lance Star printed a where-are-they-now type article on Gloria Lockerman. The article related: “...There was a slightly racist aspect to people’s fascination with her: This was before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and Gloria Lockerman was black. Her brilliance was in direct contrast to many Americans’ stereotypes of black people, and there is no question that in countless living rooms, amazement was expressed not only that a girl of her age could spell the word, but that a girl of her color could do it. ... The other fascinating thing is the aforementioned racial angle. Many a newspaper sentence began, 'Gloria, a Negro...'"
(The blog post also contains an amazing 1955 letter-to-the-editor angry about the racist coverage of Lockerman.) Her fifteen minutes of fame may now be forgotten, but evidence of it remains, such as it inspiring The $99,000 Answer, an episode of hit sitcom The Honeymooners. Fresh off her win, Lockerman was invited to nightclubs (um, she was 12?), to state fairs, made an honorary teacher in her home town, and was featured in news reels which would have ran before movie films which played at the cinema motion theater houses. There's a hint she was questioned during the congressional investigations into quiz show scandals which ended up killing the genre by 1958 and boosting Ralph Fiennes' career forty years later.
Lockerman even appeared in a bit on The Martha Raye Show, an apparently popular variety show I've never heard of before (some quick searching shows that Martha Raye, aka Maggie liked to feature "regular people" as guests). Martha Raye's show would be canned shortly after by its irate sponsors when Raye and another white co-star kissed Lockerman, with the follow-up episode featuring a sketch where Raye appeared to get drunk... oh the horror! But Gloria's TV fame was only taking off, with her having appeared on screen 14 different times in the four months after her debut. Like happens, after such overexposure, Lockerman soon faded from interest, and by age 45, a Chicago Tribune reporter searching for her wrote in 1987:
She explained to me that there is nothing she values more than her privacy. She gained so much fame in 1955 that, long ago, she decided it was enough fame for a lifetime. In that summer of ’55 she went from being a shy, brilliant student to an object of the country’s collective curiosity-both because she was so smart at such a young age and because the fact that she was black went against many Americans’ backward stereotypes of the intellectual capacities of black people during that era.
All this antidisestablishmentarianismism was going on in 1955 when my mother was only one year old, a touch too young to be absorbing pop culture. But not too young for her three older siblings, nor for her similarly fascinated-by-trivia father (my grandfather). My mother and grandfather are both sadly passed, but her siblings are very much still here, and might enjoy me poking around into the nonsense of their youth, so I'll have to ask next time I see one of them. But whether they remember Lockerman and her quiz show appearance or not, it seems clear that the rise of American interest in the oddly long word from the political history of England, antidisestablishmentarianism, if not it's meaning, definitely stems from this moment in pop culture.
When I was a kid, my mother told me the longest English word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She didn't tell me what it meant, because that didn't matter to her, and if she told me where she herself learned this factoid, I've long since forgotten. My mother loved trivia for trivia's sake.
The word is weird enough that it actually has two different pages on the big wiki, one explaining the word itself and one for what is represents: opposing the separation of church and state. But as some other anonymous wikipedian once wrote on the page for the longest word in English, "The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of 'word' and of length," and, being wikipedia, the page's first entry is some chemical nomenclature 189,819 letters long and comes with the helpful note "whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed." Well, no shit. There's a lot of weird technical and nonsense words contending to be longest on the list, because language nerds are like that, but down the page, it is pointed out that the longest non-weird words a person is likely to encounter are "deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each" (although I can't help but notice my browser's spell check balks at the former).
So what's the deal with antidisestablishmentarianism, why did my mother know this random word? I can only guess, but this 2009 Old Time Radio Bulletin post has a clue: (The blog post also contains an amazing 1955 letter-to-the-editor angry about the racist coverage of Lockerman.) Her fifteen minutes of fame may now be forgotten, but evidence of it remains, such as it inspiring The $99,000 Answer, an episode of hit sitcom The Honeymooners. Fresh off her win, Lockerman was invited to nightclubs (um, she was 12?), to state fairs, made an honorary teacher in her home town, and was featured in news reels which would have ran before movie films which played at the cinema motion theater houses. There's a hint she was questioned during the congressional investigations into quiz show scandals which ended up killing the genre by 1958 and boosting Ralph Fiennes' career forty years later.
Lockerman even appeared in a bit on The Martha Raye Show, an apparently popular variety show I've never heard of before (some quick searching shows that Martha Raye, aka Maggie liked to feature "regular people" as guests). Martha Raye's show would be canned shortly after by its irate sponsors when Raye and another white co-star kissed Lockerman, with the follow-up episode featuring a sketch where Raye appeared to get drunk... oh the horror! But Gloria's TV fame was only taking off, with her having appeared on screen 14 different times in the four months after her debut. Like happens, after such overexposure, Lockerman soon faded from interest, and by age 45, a Chicago Tribune reporter searching for her wrote in 1987:
All this antidisestablishmentarianismism was going on in 1955 when my mother was only one year old, a touch too young to be absorbing pop culture. But not too young for her three older siblings, nor for her similarly fascinated-by-trivia father (my grandfather). My mother and grandfather are both sadly passed, but her siblings are very much still here, and might enjoy me poking around into the nonsense of their youth, so I'll have to ask next time I see one of them. But whether they remember Lockerman and her quiz show appearance or not, it seems clear that the rise of American interest in the oddly long word from the political history of England, antidisestablishmentarianism, if not it's meaning, definitely stems from this moment in pop culture.