Weird Words: Zymurgy

Weird Words: Zymurgy[image: IPA pronunciation of 'Zymurgy']

1) The chemistry or practice of fermentation processes.

Though a useful term, people's interest in it outside winemaking and brewing
focuses on its supposedly being the literal last word. The phrase *from
aardvark to zymurgy* is sometimes used to mean everything, these supposedly
being the first and last nouns in the dictionary.

However, a check on my big stack of single-volume dictionaries shows that —
apart from the *New Oxford American Dictionary* — *zymurgy* is rarely the
last word. Some have one of related sense, *zythum*, a beer that was made by
the ancient Egyptians; others prefer to end with *Zyrian*, another name for
the language now usually called Komi; the *American Heritage Dictionary*selects
*zyzzyva*, a genus of tropical American weevils, which is also the last word
in *The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary*; you may feel that *The
Bloomsbury English Dictionary* has cheated by including *zzz*, "a
representation of the sound made by somebody sleeping or snoring, often used
in cartoons".

When not the focus of wordsmiths' musings and occasional wordplay,
*zymurgy*is rather rare, though as you would expect it's well known
among brewers and
winemakers. The journal of the American Homebrewers Association has that
title and its readers may be either *zymurgists* or *zymologists*, to taste.
If you need a related adjective, there's *zymurgical*. All these words come
from Greek *zume*, meaning a leaven, typically a yeast, that is added to
make a substance ferment.

Notwithstanding the pronunciation that's given in some word books, the first
vowel is like that in *bite*, not *bit*, so it's roughly "ZAI-mur-jee".