Song title from the 1964 movie "Mary Poppins"; widely recognised and sometimes used as an adjective with unclear meaning
According to Richard M. Sherman, co-writer of the song with his brother, Robert, the word was created by them in two weeks, mostly out of double-talk.[2]
The roots of the word have been defined[3] as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." It should be noted that although the word contains recognizable English morphemes, it does not follow the rules of English morphology as a whole. The morpheme -istic is a suffix in English, whereas the morpheme ex- is typically a prefix; so following normal English morphological rules, it would represent two words: supercalifragilistic and expialidocious. As one word, it also violates the rule that the letter c cannot sound like a k when followed by an e, an i or a y. An acceptable alternative spelling is supercalifragilisticexpealidocious, replacing the "pi" with "pe."[citation needed]
This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (February 2009)
According to the 1964 Walt Disney film, it is defined as "what you say when you don't know what to say".
