Not a "real" word? Well now... let me see here...
According to the American Heritage Dictionary a word can be defined as "A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes."
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia seems to fit the criteria to be considered a word. Nothing in that definition states that "frivolous construction" is an exclusion criterion in determining whether or not a unit of language is to be considered a word. Linguistically speaking a word is the unit of language between the morpheme and the phrase; how the word came to be is irre...

Not a "real" word? Well now... let me see here...
According to the American Heritage Dictionary a word can be defined as "A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes."
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia seems to fit the criteria to be considered a word. Nothing in that definition states that "frivolous construction" is an exclusion criterion in determining whether or not a unit of language is to be considered a word. Linguistically speaking a word is the unit of language between the morpheme and the phrase; how the word came to be is irrelevant to its status as a word. A more important question to the linguist would be "Is the word actually used in communication between people?" And the answer to that? Probably not by many in verbal communication. And prior to the internet, probably not by many in written communication either. But if you do a Google search for hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, you will find that it yields about 62,000 hits. Compare that to a search for deoxyephedrine, most certainly a "real word" for a chemical better known as "crystal meth", but which yields only 5,280 hits. So what exactly is a "real word" anyway?

Well actually, yes... I do consider "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" to be a word... a nonsense word, but a word none the less. And I'm apparently not alone in that -- the contributors to the Wikipedia article of the same name have this to say about it:

:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is defined as a nonsense word that is used to describe the longest word."

Apparently you have a different definition of the word "word" than I and others do. I'm sure you will find many who agree with you -- I'm just not one of them. I'm completely satisfied with my existing definition of "word".

And while I don't have my degree in linguistics, I do have several linguistics courses under my belt...

Well actually, yes... I do consider "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" to be a word... a nonsense word, but a word none the less. And I'm apparently not alone in that -- the contributors to the Wikipedia article of the same name have this to say about it:

:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is defined as a nonsense word that is used to describe the longest word."

Apparently you have a different definition of the word "word" than I and others do. I'm sure you will find many who agree with you -- I'm just not one of them. I'm completely satisfied with my existing definition of "word".

And while I don't have my degree in linguistics, I do have several linguistics courses under my belt -- enough for me to know what is linguistically considered a "word"... and enough to know that Google hits can provide some very useful statistics for linguistic research.