My husband told me with glee that Nicholas Byfield had a great big stone ‘like flint’ in his bladder, weighing 33 ounces, which ‘exceedingly afflicted’ him for 15 years, until it killed him in 1622, aged 44. It did not stop him writing about the Epistle to the Colossians and remarking that Christ’s divine nature is ‘incircumscriptible in respect of place’. This is doubtless true, but most interest has focused on the length of the word.
In 1900 James Murray, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (to the new history of which by Peter Gilliver I keenly look forward), completed the section I–Infer. ‘Those who are interested in the length of words,’ he noted in an introduction, ‘will observe that incircumscriptibleness, which forms the catch-word on p. 154, has as many letters as honorificabilitudinity.’
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