Necrotizing Sialometaplasia

There's a bit of disagreement over just how many words are in the average English speaker's vocabulary. Studies have reached widely varying conclusions. Depending on when and where the study was conducted, the figure ranges from 20 or 30 thousand upwards of 150 or 200 thousand. This is due, in part, to disagreements over how many words there are in the English language and, for that fact, what you count as a word in the first place. Bill Bryson, in his wonderful book The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, points out that the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000 entries, and that doesn't include medical or scientific terms or the names of flora and fauna, which would add millions more.

Of course, it is one thing to understand a word and quite another to actually use it. And that brings us to Necrotizing Sialometaplasia, a phrase which would probably give most of us pause, even if we knew what it meant.

Fortunately, The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library is an extensive and terrific source of medical information. In addition to finding a tremendous wealth of advice for virtually any medical issue (i.e., when a Gila monster clamps on to you and starts to inject venom by chewing, "applying a flame under the lizard's chin" may be a good way to get it to open its jaws so you may remove it), their Pronunciation Guide provides an audio clip of the exact pronunciation for an extensive list of medical terms.

Make sure your speakers are on, click on a term, and a lovely mellow voice carefully pronounces the word or phrase for you. (Not only that, but a number of different voices are used for different terms.) Soon, you too will be able to speak with confidence about a nonketotic hyperglycemic-hyperosmolar coma. Abetalipoproteinemia will fall trippingly from your tongue, and no longer will mucopolysaccharidoses give you pause.

There is poetry in these pronunciations. The site is worth a visit just to hear the flow of the syllables.