Zenzizenzizenzic

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The zenzizenzizenzic "doeth represent the square of squares squared", or eighth power of a number. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his work The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557, although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike.

Page from The Whetstone of Witte, 1557. Zenzizenzizenzike occurs at the top of the right hand page.

The word is obsolete except as a curiosity; the Oxford English Dictionary has only one citation for it. It survives as a historical oddity.

The word dates from a time when there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers other than squares and cubes. Its root word is the German zenzic, from the medieval Italian censo, meaning "squared." Since the square of a square of a number is its fourth power, Recorde used the word zenzizenzic (spelt by him as zenzizenzike) to express it. This is a condensed form of the Italian censo di censo, used by Leonardo of Pisa in his famous book Liber Abaci of 1202. Similarly, as the sixth power of a number is equal to the square of its cube, Recorde used the word zenzicubike (a more modern spelling, zenzicube, is found in Samuel Jeake's Logisticelogia) to express it. Finally, the word zenzizenzizenzic denotes the square of the square of a number's square, which is its eighth power.

Zenzizenzizenzic has more Zs than any other word in the English language.^[1]

References

External links

• Entry at Weird Words