Quizzaciously

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About

"Quizzaciously" is an English word meaning “in a mocking manner.” In September 2015, the word was widely referenced online in response to a Vsauce episode noting its position as a Google search hapax legomenon,^[1] a linguistic term for a word that only appears once in a body of text.

Origin

On September 15th, 2015, the Vsauce YouTube channel uploaded an explanatory video on the statistical phenomenon known as Zipf’s law (shown below), in which the host Michael Stevens briefly mentions the word “quizzaciously” as a notable example of a hapax legomenon in the English language, since it only appears once in Google Search results^[8] despite its inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Spread

That day, Redditor PM_ME_LEGAL_PAPERS submitted the question "Reddit, have you ever seen the word 'quizzaciously'?" to the r/AskReddit^[5] subreddit. Shortly after, Vsauce host Michael Stevens posted a tweet^[6] announcing that the Reddit post doubled Google's results for "quizzaciously" (shown below). That evening, the /r/quizzaciously^[2] subreddit was launched for discussions about the word.

On September 16th, a Wikipedia^[3] page for "Quizzaciously" was created, which notes the word's former status as a hapax legomenon. That day, the article was flagged for deletion.

Also on September 16th, the single-serving site Quizzaciously.com was launched, featuring an embed of the Vsauce episode. Meanwhile, YouTuber Liam Heffernan^[7] changed the title for the music video "Chacarron Macarron" by El Mudo to "Quizzaciously."