 honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative and ablative plural of the medieval latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". it is mentioned by the character costard in act v, scene i of william shakespeare's love's labour's lost. as it appears only once in shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon in the shakespeare canon. it is also the longest word in the english language featuring only alternating consonants and vowels.http://www.innocentenglish.com/cool-interesting-and-strange-facts/cool-strange-and-interesting-facts-page-3-3.html|see fact #99 ==use in love's labour's lost== the word is spoken by the comic rustic costard in act v, scene 4 of the play. it is used after an absurdly pretentious dialogue between the pedantic schoolmaster holofernes and his friend sir nathaniel. the two pedants converse in a mixture of latin and florid english. when moth, a witty young servant, enters, costard says of the pedants:  flap-dragon was a game which involved trying to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy. ==use in baconianism== the word has been used by adherents of the baconian theoryâwho believe shakespeare's plays were written in steganographic cypher by francis bacon. in 1905 isaac hull platt argued that it was an anagram for hi ludi, f. baconis nati, tuiti orbi, latin for "these plays, f. bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world".http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1o54-baconiantheory.html his argument was given wide circulation by edwin durning-lawrence in 1910, complete with a cryptonumerical attempt to prove it justified.k. k. ruthven, faking literature, cambridge university press, 2001, p.102 the anagram assumes that bacon would have latinized his name as "baco" (the genitive case of which is "baconis") rather than as "baconus" (the genitive of which would be "baconi"). samuel schoenbaum argues that bacon would have latinized his name as "baconus", with genitive "baconi".samuel schoenbaum, shakespeare's lives, oxford university press, 2nd ed.1991 p.421 it is far from the only possible anagram. in 1898, paget toynbee noted that the word contains a glorification of dante by himself as its letters could be rearranged to form the phrase ubi italicus ibi danti honor f
Baconian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship Latin_words_and_phrases Shakespearean_phrases William_Shakespeare