Longest Italian word: archive correction?

[Holger Wahlen]

In a book about Italian I recently read, "precipitevolissimevolmente"
(26 letters) is mentioned as the longest word in the language, apart
from numbers and compound nouns; I've found it in all three Italian
dictionaries I have (one monolingual, two Italian/German), and
according to Altavista, it's contained on 39 Web pages, so it doesn't
even seem very uncommon. The archive, however, only lists four words
of 18 letters each; is there a good reason not to change that?

/HW

[Hans Havermann]

Holger Wahlen <wah...@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de> wrote:

> according to Altavista, it's contained on 39 Web pages, so it doesn't
> even seem very uncommon.

Roughly the same number of hits that the artificially-constructed
English "supercalifragilisticexpialidocius" appears. One has to be
careful interpreting web-search statistics. How many of the hits are
mirrors (pretty much) of the same thing? How much of the commonality can
be attributed to other factors (a popular book, the length of the word,
etc.)? How many hits are *missing* because somebody has spelled the word
incorrectly? :-)

Speaking of spelling, Alta Vista just came up with 92451 "English" hits
for "wierd". Perhaps this "word" will find its way into the dictionary
one day. :-)

[Hans Havermann]

I wrote:

> Speaking of spelling, Alta Vista just came up with 92451 "English" hits
> for "wierd". Perhaps this "word" will find its way into the dictionary
> one day. :-)

Can anybody explain this? When I pick the "any language" option in Alta
Vista, I get 139860 hits for "wierd", a surfeit of 47409 over the
"English" search. Yet, when I try to break this surfeit down by
language, I only find 419 hits. [Dutch, 114; German, 92; Japanese, 49;
Swedish, 38; Spanish, 27; Portuguese, 23; Russian, 18; French, 17;
Italian, 9; Danish, 7; Norwegian, 7; Chinese, 5; Finnish, 5; Estonian,
2; Hungarian, 2; Korean, 2; Hebrew, 1; Romanian, 1.]