ultraconserved

“Thou,
I.
Not that we, to give who.
This, what, man – male, ye old mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull black, to flow, bark ashes, to spit, worm.”

— The “23 ultraconserved words” that have remained largely unchanged for 15,000 years”, “listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates”, from WaPo, punctuation mine.

l2g w3s

here’s some handy abbrvs. for Peter Norvig’s (via nerdcore) “24 words with length of 20 or more (that are mentioned at least 100,000 times each in the [google books] corpus)”:

electroencephalographic → e21c
polytetrafluoroethylene → p21e
 forschungsgemeinschaft → f20t
 deinstitutionalization → d20n
 counterrevolutionaries → c20s
 dehydroepiandrosterone → d20e
 electroencephalography → e20y
  immunoelectrophoresis → i19s
   institutionalisation → i18n
   acetylcholinesterase → a18e
   internationalization → i18n
   institutionalization → i18n
   radiopharmaceuticals → r18s
   electroencephalogram → e18m
   keratoconjunctivitis → k18s
   counterrevolutionary → c18y
   immunohistochemistry → i18y
   internationalisation → i18n
   hypercholesterolemia → h18a
   phosphatidylinositol → p18l
   compartmentalization → c18n
   electrophysiological → e18l
   electrocardiographic → e18c
   uncharacteristically → u18y

btw these words are utterly useless for scrabble.