Thanks to Brian E. Hanlon, Assistant Commissioner for Patents at the USPTO, I learned a new word today:
antepenultimate.
Assistant Commissioner Hanlon recently published a memo dated October 24, 2025 entitled Advance notice of change to the MPEP with respect to false assertions or certifications of entity status. It contains these words:
The ante-penultimate and penultimate paragraphs in MPEP § 410 are revised to read …
Of course we all already knew what “penultimate” means, namely “second from the end”. Thanks to Mr. Hanlon, today I learned of the existence of “antepenultimate” which means “third from the end”. (The word is not actually hyphenated.)
It turns out that there are more words like this:
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- “preantepenultimate” means “fourth from the end” and
- “propreantepenultimate” means “fifth from the end”.
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At some point the increasingly numerous prefixes cause the length of the word to exceed that of its definition, a condition perhaps meriting its own neologism: How about ‘lexipompous’? 😉
These terms are useful, because I disagree that “penultimate” means second from the end. “Ultimate” is the end, and “penultimate” is next to the end/first from the end. “Antepenultimate,” in my view, is second from the end. So, “second from the end” and “third from the end” are ambiguous terms.
I learned these terms when studying Latin, as they are employed when discussing specific syllables. I have never seen “antepenultimate” spelled with a hyphen.
This may be relevant (or not): https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4658