
Zenzizenzizenzic - vinchuco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzizenzic
======
Zenzizenzizenzi
And this is the story of how I learned that HN usernames are max 15 letters.

~~~
cperciva
My username, on the other hand, is what happens when UNIX systems have 8
character limits. (IRIX, 1994; my father was "percival" so I got cperciva as
my university systems account, and I've used it ever since.)

~~~
stronglikedan
My sister's university (1990's) gave out email addresses to students, using
the first initial, first three letters of the last name, and a number to
designate how many times that combination had been used. Her name is Amanda
Nal___. Her email address was <anal1@___.edu>.

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j0e1
> he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly".

Now that's what I'd call a classic definition.

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monfrere
> Recorde proposed three mathematical terms by which any power (that is, index
> or exponent) greater than 1 could be expressed: zenzic, i.e. squared; cubic;
> and sursolid, i.e. raised to a prime number greater than three, the smallest
> of which is five. Sursolids were as follows: 5 was the first; 7, the second;
> 11, the third; 13, the fourth; etc.

> Table of powers, symbols and names or descriptions form 0 to 24 by Samuel
> Jeake, written in 1671 Therefore, a number raised to the power of six would
> be zenzicubic, a number raised to the power of seven would be the second
> sursolid, hence bissursolid (not a multiple of two and three), a number
> raised to the twelfth power would be the "zenzizenzicubic" and a number
> raised to the power of ten would be the square of the (first) sursolid. The
> fourteenth power was the square of the second sursolid, and the twenty-
> second was the square of the third sursolid.

A truly awful system.

~~~
jballanc
I see you've never had to deal with IUPAC systemic naming? For example
paracetamol's systemic name is N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-Acetamide. Cholesterol's is
2,15-dimethyl-14-(1,5-dimethylhexyl)tetracyclo[8.7.0.02,7.011,15]heptadec-7-en-5-ol.

~~~
andrepd
That at least has a logical meaning, and you really can't simplify it because
the thing it represents is that complicated. Using a complicated system of
strange words to represent _numbers_ is incomparably worse.

~~~
jballanc
Meh...it's more of a relic of a weird transition point when chemists had the
tools to discover complete structures but didn't have the tools to communicate
them robustly other than "in words". These days most non-trivial chemicals are
described using their "common name" (e.g. Cholesterol), and if you need a
robust way of communicating structure there's SMILES (e.g.
C[C@H](CCCC(C)C)[C@H]1CC[C@@H]2[C@@]1(CC[C@H]3[C@H]2CC=C4[C@@]3(CC[C@@H](C4)O)C)C
for Cholesterol).

Almost no one will attempt to parse SMILES for non-trivial molecules by hand,
but almost every computational package can easily parse them.

~~~
gleenn
That's a tree based molecule language with the parens right? This must be for
organic molecules mostly then because you can repeat atoms as in, i.e. crystal
molecules?

~~~
jballanc
SMILES is usable for any molecule (i.e. any compound with covalent bonds;
crystals are generally not considered molecules), though it's most common use
is for organic molecules. Parens indicate branching, and cycles are
conceptually treated as branches that revisit the same atom twice.

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mrob
I first saw this word in the roguelike game "Dungeons of Dredmor". I didn't
know it was a real English word until now. In the game it's a a magic power
buff, stackable up to three castings, which makes sense given the real
meaning. Doesn't raise the stat to the 8th power though, which would be very
overpowered.

~~~
taco_emoji
> real English word

Well, for certain values of "real" :)

~~~
mikeash
Integer?

~~~
lultimouomo
It seems rather complex actually.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You know what's a (C + Ji)? A complex joke.

You know why complex jokes are not funny? Because the joke part is imaginary.

(I'll see myself out.)

~~~
iliis
[https://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6136922/il_fullxfull.22504...](https://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6136922/il_fullxfull.225045340.jpg)
;)

~~~
stirner
i is calling the kettle black, because i is not rational -- try expressing it
as a ratio of two integers.

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noobermin
And this is what exponents replaced. I think mathematical notation is like
vim, it's _easy to use_ but _hard to learn_. For example, I cannot imagine
having to express perturbative series in this notation or any serious physical
model with the "wordy" descriptions from history.

~~~
pavlov
Vim and mathematical notation are efficient for a power user, but I'm not
convinced that "easy to use" and "efficient to use" are the same thing.

~~~
kbenson
For any notation, there are trade offs between ease of learning and power
after learning. This is the same for mathematical notations as it is for
programming languages. If you can effectively subsidize a complex
notation/language such that everyone knows it (for example, through primary
education), it pays dividends in many locations. There's a reason we use '+'
for addition in many programming languages, and it's because it's familiar to
everyone. Why is that? Because we all learned it long ago and have been using
it ever since.

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nathan_f77
Sounds like a bug in a startup name generator

~~~
iopq
Sounds like an automatically generated Java interface

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partycoder
Interesting. Another interesting thing are archaic trigonometric functions
like versine and such.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versine)

~~~
jfroma
Correct me if I am wrong but I don't think this one is that archaic.

I remember this one from high school (1999/2000). Is "verseno" (Spanish).

~~~
tamana
It's not really archaic as a name, it's just a very rarely used concept.

When would you need to refer to versions by name?

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farhaven
> This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th-century _Welsh_ writer

Well that explains it.

~~~
twic
The very same book introduced the equals sign, so it's not complete madness.

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rbobby
For a name proposed by Welshman there is a suspicious number of vowels in it.

~~~
Tharkun
And a distinct lack of ll, ng, or dd!

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dahart
It's so cute! This reminds me a lot of the naming schemes for large numbers,
like Enneadekillion and Quinquagintaquadringentilliard. Some of these are
still "modern", even if nobody really uses them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers)

Thankfully, just like numeric exponents make Zenzizenzizenzic obsolete,
exponential notation mostly makes large number names obsolete.

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discordianfish
German here; Never ever heard zenzic. Zen could mean "Zehn" which means ten,
where Zic might be an old variant of the suffix -zig which is used to build
numbers between 20-99.

Vierzig for example means Forty (Vier = four, plus the suffix). Interestingly
it's not as simple for other numbers where the base of the word gets butchered
a bit like in english. So as it's "Forty", not "Fourty" it's also "Zwanzig"
(20) not "Zweizig".

All that makes me wonder if it really ever meant 'squared' or was rather a old
form to build number >100\. If Neunzig is 90, Zenzig sounds like it could be
100.

~~~
Scarblac
The linked article says that it is a German spelling of medieval Italian
_censo_, meaning squared.

~~~
schoen
I wonder how censo came to mean that in Italian. (It doesn't seem to have that
meaning today.)

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gondolgames
This reminds me of the song Zungguzungguguzungguzeng by Yellowman.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV46OGU7ksE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV46OGU7ksE)

~~~
centizen
Wouldn't surprised me if it's ultimately the source of the song's name, just
in a different language or dialect.

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Reason077
Need to remember this one for Scrabble(tm).

~~~
ta33
not enough Zs bro

~~~
breadbox
One Z, two blanks. It can be done.

A bigger problem is that it's one letter longer than the Scrabble board
admits.

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nickbauman
A little bit like this, maybe?

[http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm](http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm)

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ClashTheBunny
Is somebody writing a new 4clojure/exercism/job interview coding problem?

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csours
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WordAvalanches/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WordAvalanches/)

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kixpanganiban
Imagine if we used this today and we must input
zenzizenzizenzizenzizenzizenic(x) to the terminal to get a desired power of a
number.

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ruricolist
I'm reminded of Urquhart's "Trissotetras":

[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?rgn=main;vi...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext)

------
m3andros
This is hard to pronounce -- like the Georgian chess grandmaster Roman
Dzindzichashvili.

~~~
majewsky
Coming from (East) Germany, I don't find that name to difficult to pronounce.
It just takes a few moments to locate the syllable boundaries. :)

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jimmytidey
How could it not occur to him to use numbers rather than words?

~~~
mwfunk
Probably because so much of math was derived from couching things in terms of
geometry and geometric proofs. For quite a while squares and cubes were
fundamental operations (hence the fact that we use names for them to this
day), but general reasoning about exponents independently of geometry was more
of a gradual development.

For example, x^4 would have been thought of as a square of a square, with all
the geometric meaning that that entails, moreso than as a convenient way to
express x * x * x * x. People wouldn't have cared about x * x * x * x, but
they might have been interested in the properties of squared squares, hence
the oddball naming schemes.

People reasoning about problems involving x^4 would have likely been using
verbal proofs involving geometric concepts than using the notation everyone
uses today, and in that context x^4 is the square of a square rather than
simply being an instance of x^y in which y = 4.

Grain of salt though- this isn't my field, somebody please correct me if I'm
wrong!

~~~
honkhonkpants
What is the geometric meaning of a squared square?

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ClashTheBunny
Volume of a hypercube?

~~~
honkhonkpants
That's sort of what I figured, that it was necessarily hyperdimensional. But
then I don't see why geometers of this era would have been willing to ponder
hyperdimensional solids, but aren't willing to admit arbitrary exponents.
Path-dependent historical attitude, I guess.

~~~
phaemon
Volume of a hypercube? I swear, there's something about maths that makes your
brain work in the strangest ways.

A square of a square is a square made up of squares :)

(like a Sudoku puzzle)

~~~
majewsky
Not really. A sudoku puzzle is a set of squares arranged inside another,
bigger square. If it were a square of squares, it would mean that you square
the initial square's volume _including the unit_. But in this case, you're
only multiplying with a count (or rather, a squared count, since we're talking
about two dimensions).

~~~
phaemon
? We're not talking about any units, we're talking about numbers. There are
3^4 squares in a Sudoku puzzle. You don't need a hypercube or any unit of
measurement to see that's true.

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heezo
I was really hoping for a Planet Rock reference.

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zenzi3c
My username wins.

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akerro
Zenzizenzizenzic - of course Welsh writer, who else.

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hashb
a classic definition

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ronreiter
oh my god, you guys are bored as well :)

