I recently wrote about why I Avoid ‘Get’ and ‘Set’ when naming accessors. In that post, I included a couple of quotes from Kevlin Henney. After publishing, I had an interesting Twitter exchange with Kevlin that resulted in some additional information.

I contacted Kevlin to see if he could recall the source of the final quote I used:

‘get’ is one of the words with the most definitions in the English language.  It takes up pages and pages of the OED and has approximately 20 different meanings.  So don’t use it in your code.  The only word that I know of that has more definitions is ‘set’, which has about 30 different meanings and covers more pages.

He wasn’t able to recall where he originally wrote that, but he did share a couple of other interesting facts.

He also shared a link to a page of facts about the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), where it says that the longest entry in the Second Edition is:

the verb ‘set’ with over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000 characters

Thanks for the additional information, Kevlin!