Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Meaning

I still remember the film which I loved and watched over and over again whenever it was shown on TV during my childhood.

This song was sung by Mary Poppins right after she won the horse race with cartoon characters. All flustered and excited, she met with reporters who told her that she must be probably out of words due to her win.

Basically one cartoon reporter asked her:

"There probably aren't words to describe your emotion."

To which she replied

"Now gentlemen please...on the contrary, there's a very good word"

that comes to her mind which is totally appropriate for the occasion. And then she started to sing the very famous song, starting with these lines:

"It's Supercalafragilisticexpialidocious, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, if you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!"

And then the world stopped. Well, at least temporary to listen to her beautiful music.

With this song basically Mary Poppins said that when there is nothing to say really, there is always something one can say, even if it's as silly as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It means it's fantastic, super, incredible, wow - amazing feeling! It's like...once you managed to say the word, you really got it off your chest.

I read an article a while ago on how the word was put together by the song writers. It goes like this.

• Super meaning above
• Cali meaning beauty
• Fragilistic meaning delicate
• Expiali meaning to atone
• Docious meaning educable

So this might translate roughly to atoning for very fragile and extreme beauty while being quite educable.

Btw, I remember that as a child I learned that if I could say the word loud and without mistakes, I sounded precious (no wonder I'm a geek now).

Of course there is also another meaning for the words, which might not have been intended by the writers, but there it is: it's the 2nd longest English words (albeit a nonsensical word) currently in existence.

The longest one that is actually in the dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is basically a lung diseases caused by inhalation of silica dust (also called silicosis).

There are 2 other words that are even longer, however they are not officially included in the dictionary, so officially Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sits proudly at #2.

The Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious song was written for the film Mary Poppins by the brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (sadly Robert B. Sherman passed away in 2012).

In an interview several years back Richard Sherman said that this word basically came up from a game the two brothers were playing ever since childhood: who can find the longest and most obnoxious word ever by adding double-talk words to make up something silly.

The word they started with was atrocious, so building on that came the words precocious. So from atrocious and precocious they built this lovely monster of a word that I sadly no longer can say without taking a peek, like I could do in my childhood.

Apparently the second longest word in the English language was built over two weeks.

At some point it entered the Oxford Dictionary, which defines it an expression of very exited approval.