“A.Word.A.Day” is “a worldwide online community of some half-million readers who share a love for words, wordplay, language, and literature.” The selected words may be antiques, borrowings or just words that sound intriguing. Recently, internationalization was the word of the day, complete with the software-world definition and a mention of the related term localization/localisation. Feedback included a comment about the US vs. British spellings — internationalization vs. internationalisation — and one reader pointed out that using the abbreviations i18n and l10n neatly avoids choosing between the two spellings.

The term, however it’s spelled, was an entry in the category of long words that are fun to say. And internationalization is far more useful in conversation and in business than antidisestablishmentarianism!