Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - Origin and Meaning

Origin and Meaning

According to Richard M. Sherman, co-writer of the song with his brother, Robert, the word was created by them in two weeks, mostly out of double-talk.

The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." Although the word contains recognizable English morphemes, it does not follow the rules of English morphology as a whole. The morpheme -istic is a suffix in English, whereas the morpheme ex- is typically a prefix; so following normal English morphological rules, it would represent two words: supercalifragilistic and expialidocious. The pronunciation also leans towards it being two words since the letter c doesn't normally sound like a k when followed by an e, an i or a y.

According to the film, it is defined as "something to say when you have nothing to say".

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