‘Quasquicentennial’—Pronunciation, History and A Big Party

If you don’t know this already, heads up: Western Springs will begin its yearlong celebration of its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary as an incorporated village on January 30th, with a giant quasquicentennial party outside McClure Junior High School. And it should, by all accounts, be pretty awesome.

To repeat, though: a giant quasquicentennial party. “Quasquicentennial.”

Village officials and 125th committee members alike have taken that six-syllable monster word as Western Springs’ own. Despite its seeming tongue-twisting properties, imposing length and National-Spelling-Bee-esque letter-jumble (two Q’s!), “quasquicentennial” is the Village’s unofficial word of the year and is rapidly spreading through town.

“When we were in the beginning of the very early stages of the planning, it kept coming up,” said committee co-chair Jim Tilden. “Tons of other communities have used the word and celebrated their Q’s. It’s obviously not as well-known as ‘centennial,’ but I like the word.”

According to Village Management Analyst and quasquicentennial planner Lucy Carter Smith, a number of alternate names have floated around the Village offices for those unable to handle the twisty word on the fly, “The Big Q” and “The Buck and a Quarter” being popular. (Tilden often refers to committee meetings as Q-meetings in e-mails.)

Pronouncing the behemoth word actually isn’t all that difficult. “Centennial” is a fairly well-known word: “sen-ten-ee-uhl.” Tack on “kwos-kwi-” to the front, and you have it: “kwos-kwi-sen-ten-ee-uhl.”

Or, if you can make sense out of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), try: /ˌkwɒskwɪsɛnˈtɛniəl/ … and either way, you can hear a computerized voice speak the word here at dictionary.com.

“My thought was to make it a mandate that every grade-school child was to learn how to pronounce and spell ‘quasquicentennial,’” Tilden added half-jokingly. “But I was talked out of that.”

Village Manager Pat Higgins, who took an early interest in the word, even unearthed a five-page 1965 article from the journal American Speech, by linguist, lexicographer, and Duke University professor Robert L. Chapman, entitled “The History of ‘Quasquicentennial.’”

In the article, Chapman writes that he personally invented the word on August 7, 1961, in response to a request from one Frank W. Hatten, of Delavan, Ill., for an appropriate term to describe Delavan’s 125th anniversary.

Previously, the term “cenquadtennial” had been coined, but Chapman suggested that since the established term for a 150th anniversary, “sesquicentennial,” was based on the Latin semis que—“and a half”—a merging of either quarta que or quadrans que (“and a fourth”) would be appropriate. Of his merged options, he proclaimed “quasquicentennial” to be “the least ugly.”

Hatten apparently loved the word so much that he began a personal crusade to spread it into common use. By August, 1962, just a year after its coinage, a feature story on the word was published in the Associated Press; by 1963 it began to appear in dictionaries, a success that appears to have delighted Chapman.

“In the future, when festival authorities tackle the problem of a name, they may be lucky enough to locate this quasquipedalian brute of a word that answers their need,” Chapman wrote in 1965.

As Western Springs gears up for a giant 125th—sorry, quasquicentennial bash—it would indeed seem that Chapman’s “brute of a word” has answered our need.

And if anyone’s really complaining about the difficulty of the word, they should probably get out of town before 2061.

That’s when we’ll celebrate our septaquintaquinquecentennial.