How Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Became the Biggest Word You Ever Heard

See Richard Sherman tell the story behind the word "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious":

We know "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is the "biggest word you ever heard," but how did it come to be a word at all?

Since the made-up word jumped off "Mary Poppins's" screen and made its way into the dictionary, we thought it would be nice to know how it arrived in the first place. We went straight to the source to get the straight dope.

Last week, we phoned Disney icon Richard Sherman, who, along with his brother Robert, wrote some of Disney's most memorable tunes, including "It's a Small World," "Winnie the Pooh," and all the songs from "Mary Poppins" (as beautifully depicted in "Saving Mr. Banks," now available on Blu-ray).

The original inspiration for the song came from one of P.L. Travers's original "Mary Poppins" stories, when Mary meets Bert, a sidewalk artist. Bert and Mary decide to have tea together, so they hop into one of Bert's sidewalk pictures. They take their tea, and then they hop right back into reality.  

"When Bob and I read that story, we said, 'My God, there's the opportunity! She's a nanny for God's sake. Let's bring the children along and have a real adventure with it,'” said Sherman.

That germ of an idea was one of the very first sparks of imagination that the Shermans came up with. But just because they knew they'd be going on an adventure, they didn't know where.

[Related: Travel to Tom Hanks-Land With the Cast of ‘Saving Mr. Banks’]

 "What are we going to do in this adventure? Well, let's say that we have a little song. So we started with 'Jolly Holiday' which is sort of a period piece. It sort of set the style of English musical, which is what we wanted to do," said Sherman.  

From there, the Sherman Brothers, along with writer Don DaGradi concocted an other-worldly English landscape, full of Walt Disney's "silly cartoons," as Travers (Emma Thompson) refers to them in "Saving Mr. Banks." The scene culminates with Mary winning a merry-go-round-horse race. But how would the Shermans describe that in words?

"And we said, 'Now we can do something special.' And we had the idea that Mary Poppins would introduce something that would be a souvenir for the children to take out of this make-believe adventure," said Sherman.

And that's where the real fun started.

"That's where we started with, 'We'll come up with a crazy, nutcase word and we'll go from there.' And so we decided it's got to be obnoxious and obnoxious is not a good word but atrocious is because it sounds British and we're doing a British piece. 'So atrocious,' we said, 'It's got to be a super colossal word that's atrocious.' So we started with super colossal and then atrocious and we said, 'Atrocious. What rhymes with that? Well, you sound smart when you do one of these big long words so then you're precocious, that's smart. Okay. Supercolossalprecociousatrocious.' And then we said, 'What rhymes with that? Well, docious, that rhymes.' Okay. So we stuck that at the end."

[Related: ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ Trailer Reveals the Unknown ‘Mary Poppins’ Backstory]

The end, it turns out, was a good place to start.

"We had the end of the word before we had the beginning and we started backwards and we said, 'Now we got to do double-talk because super colossal, and anybody and his Uncle Harry could say super colossal, so we got to say something that nobody else could possibly have thought of. Something cagsafragilesflagerfrogen and we made up words. Finally, after boiling it down to a couple of sentences, after a lot of discussion: califragilistic. And then we did expionit, expiala, expionit, expialidocious. Yeah, okay. Then we can rhyme with docious. And that's how we got the whole thing."

Since they already had the verses ahead of time, figuring out the word itself was the icing on the cake.

"We had a tune going and everything and it just fit perfectly into the tune. And we said, 'Yeah, that's it. That's it. We really have it now.' I mean, we just were jumping up and down. We said, “Hey. This is great. We've got it!”

As hinted to in the clip above (where Jason Schwartzman plays the part of Richard and B.J. Novak plays the part of Robert), P.L. Travers wasn't exactly jumping for joy at the finished product.

"Hated it. She thought it was ridiculous and stupid and we shouldn't do it. She didn't like anything we did. She absolutely was the most negative individual I've ever met in my entire life. And she was softened for the movie. She was worse than that," said Sherman.

Fortunately for the Shermans, their boss didn't agree with Ms. Travers (per usual).

"Well, Walt was never one to pay compliments aloud — enormous, vociferous compliments — but he said one thing to us, he said, 'That'll work,' and we knew we were in. We knew we were in."

And so were we. So were we.

See Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Jason Schwartzman, and Richard Sherman discuss the music of 'Saving Mr. Banks' and 'Mary Poppins.':

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