ZYMURGY/ˈzaɪmɜːdʒɪ/

The art or practice of fermentation.

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 (an interesting choice since Scrabble has only one z in its tiles); you may feel The Bloomsbury English Dictionary has cheated by including zzz as its last word, “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 called zymurgists. If you need a related adjective, there’s zymurgical. All these words come from Greek zume, meaning a leaven, typically a yeast, that’s added to make a substance ferment. It’s also the origin of enzyme.

The related word zymology (adjective zymologist), is the name for that part of chemistry dealing with the fermentation action of yeasts, especially relating to products intended for human consumption.

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