Weird and wonderful words

Hi all

I've always had an interest in weird words. I grew up speaking two very different languages, those being Welsh and English and found pleasure in being able to not only pronounce some pretty weird words but also understanding their meaning and, if I was lucky, their origins. I have since learned to speak and read Spanish so I will be mixing words from each language and hopefullyy entertaining you with some interesting, even funny facts and stories in the coming months.

I would like to share some of these words with you and see what comes.....

The first one I would like to share is a Welsh name. It belongs to a village in North Wales, on the island of Anglesey. I lived not far from this place in my early years and my friends and I would often challenge each other to pronounce this extremely long name -

Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

As you might have counted, there are 58 letters but in the Welsh alphabet "ch" and "ll" are a what's known as digigraphs and are treated as single letters in the Welsh language their combination forming distict sounds so in Welsh it has 51 letters, still a huge number don't you think?

The name itself is basically an address.

and was bestowed upon the village in the mid 1860's in what could be described as one of the earliest examples of a publicity stunt. The claim could rightly be made that the village train station had the longest name of any railway station in Britain and thus was used in promoting the growing tourism industry in Great Britain at that time.

So here it is, please excuse the spit :P