People Are Just Learning What The 'Most Complex' Word In English Is, And Huh

DictionaryWhen I was a kid, I was wrong about so many things. I thought craneflies, or daddy longlegs, were the “most poisonous spider in the world,” but had no way of administering their toxins (wrong on many counts). I also thought the longest word in the English language was antidisestablishmentarianism, but it is in fact pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – a lung disease caused by inhalation of silicate or quartz dust, apparently. Even as an adult, though, I would never have guessed what some experts deem the “most complex” word a standard dictionary has to offer.And nor did the members of r/todayilearned, who were as surprised as I was to find out it’s “run”.Why is “run” considered the most complex word in English?It’s because the word has so many definitions (645 for the verb form alone, the pros say). Speaking to NPR, Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, said that in the first Oxford English Dictionary, “set” actually took up the most real estate with 200 definitions. “If you go to the printed edition of the dictionary, you can see it occupies 32 full pages, 75 columns... you set something on the table, you play a set of tennis, the sun sets. It just goes on and on and on,” he shared. During the 20th century, “put” took its place. But lexicographer Peter Gilliver later found hundreds of definitions for the verb “run” alone, leaving both “put” and “set” in the dust. When you think about it, the word clearly means so many things. A line can “run” from left to right: a tap can “run”; I can “run” in the mornings, but I can also “run” someone their money.And those three letters, which probably come from Latin and Sanskrit terms for “flow” and “stream”, are uniquely fitting for today’s busy lifestyles, Winchester argued. “It is a feature of our more sort of energetic and frantic times that set and put seem, in a peculiar way, sort of rather stodgy, rather conservative, whereas run, not least all the meanings that have come from the Industrial Revolution – machines run, clocks run, computers run – there are all of those which began in the middle of the 19th century, I suppose,” he posited.People were still pretty scepticalWriting under the Reddit post sharing the fact, site user u/Waitin4Godot seemed incredulous. “The fuck?” they asked (fuck only has a meagre six meanings, ironically proving unable to breed any more definitions).Others, like u/stoneman9284 and u/Comercial_Sentence2, simply didn’t accept the fact, arguing that these were more “use cases” than separate definitions. But yberbro256′s comment went some way towards proving how many meanings the word really has: “I had to run to the store because I had the runs and I was running a fever, but my car wouldn’t run because it ran out of petrol, which made me run late,” they wrote. And that’s just the tip of a surprisingly complex iceberg.Related...This Is Why We Create Our Own Weird Language With Our PartnersHappiness Isn't The Meaning Of Life – But This Emotion May BeWhat You Call This Time May Reveal Your Age, Language Expert Says

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