Meanings
- A theoretical dictionary that contains every possible word of every length using the 26 letters found in the English language.
The Hyperwebster and each of its volumes are countably infinite.
Spring 2022, Mats Wahlberg, “The Banach-Tarski Paradox”, in Umeå University, archived from the original on 10 Jul 2022, page 253 more examples
The staff at the publishing company realizes that it can partition the words into 26 volumes, one for each letter of the alphabet. So the Hyperwebster now looks like the following: […] The content of the hyperwebster^([sic]) is equivalent to points on a real line (replace A-Z above with 0-9 and observe that it generates all real numbers).
2011 July 2, Ravi Bhide, “Hyperwebster - an uncountable dictionary”, in Theory behind the Technology, archived from the original on 15 Apr 2025Take Ian Stuart’s Hyperwebster Dictionary. This paradox shows how subtracting infinity from infinity equals… infinity! […] The Hyperwebster is a dictionary of all possible letters and combinations of letters using the 26 letters of the English alphabet. It starts out like this:
2017 December 22, “Is Math Broken? The Problem of Infinity.”, in The Nature of Things, archived from the original on 11 Sep 2025According to Stewart, by removing the first letter in every word, we can produce another copy of the Hyperwebster from each of its volumes; that is, 26 identical copies will be generated.
2021 March 8, Emmanuel Rochette, “At the End of Infinity”, in arXiv, archived from the original on 07 May 2022, page 16
Origin
From hyper- + Webster, coined by English mathematician Ian Stewart in 1996 in his book From Here to Infinity.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Hyperwebster. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hyperwebster
“Hyperwebster.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hyperwebster. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Hyperwebster,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Hyperwebster.
Source: Hyperwebster on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.