First attested (as supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus) in a 1931 Syracuse University Daily Orange column, which states that the word “implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful”. In this spelling, it was made famous by its use in a song of the same title in the movie Mary Poppins (1964), by songwriters Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman; they wrote in 1998: When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. […] The word as we first heard it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus. Apparently a fanciful formation on super (compare super-), -ic, and -ious; various rationalizations of the other elements have been offered, but none supported by any evidence. One by American linguist Richard Lederer in his book Crazy English (1989) is super- (“above”) + cali- (“beauty”) + fragilistic- (“delicate”) + expiali- (“to atone”) + -docious (“educable”), the sum of which equals “atoning for extreme and delicate beauty [while being] highly educable”. This etymology is based on calli-, fragile, expiate, and docious (“amenable to order”) or docity (“quickness of comprehension”), from Latin doceō (“to teach”). For the -docious ending, compare braggadocious (first attested in American English, in 1853), and more distantly, perhaps bodacious. The element -cali- may have been taken from California (especially in view of -califlawja- in the 1931 version). For -listic, compare (un)realistic.

celestial • divine • finger-lickin' good • heavenly • lovely jubbly • wondrous