How many before the end?

by Batman

Let’s start with ultimate (yes, that seems a bit backwards – stay with me.), as in “last”. The next-to-last, then, is penultimate, easily one of my favorite words. But there’s more! The next-to-next-to-last is the antepenultimate. Need another? The $(\text{next-to})^3$ -last is the preantepenultimate, a completely real word that Chrome’s built-in dictionary has never seen (it suggests “prearrangement”).

Why am I telling you all this? I mean, besides the sheer ridiculousness/awesomeness of a word for the fourth-to-last item in a list? I needed an excuse to post this video:

This entry was posted on September 20, 2011 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “How many before the end?”

Bryan Says:
July 6, 2013 at 2:21 pm | Reply
In some languages, natural stresses or accents fall according to rules based on counting the syllables of a word from the end towards the beginning. In this context, the words are:
last ultimate
next-to-last penultimate
next to next to last peripenultimate

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