Longest word in English

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There are seemingly endless debates over which is the longest word in English, demonstrating that the idea of what constitutes a word is not as straightforward as it seems. Hyphenated or space-delimited compounds and proper nouns are linguistically considered words, but as they can grow with few limits, they are not counted here.

"Official" longest word

The Guinness Book of Records, in its 1992 and subsequent editions, declared the "longest real word" in the English language to be floccinaucinihilipilification at 29 letters. Defined as "the act of estimating (something) as worthless", its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741. In recent times its usage has been recorded in the proceedings of the United States Senate by Senator Jesse Helms, and at the White House by Bill Clinton's press secretary Mike McCurry, albeit sarcastically. It is the longest non-technical word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The acceptability of the 33-letter adverbial form flocci­nauci­nihili­pilificastically is subject to controversy. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, an invented word supposed to refer to a lung disease. [1]

Popular usage

Antidisestablishmentarianism (a 19th century movement in England opposed to the separation of church and state) at 28 letters is often popularly accepted as English's longest word, and is probably the best-known "longest word." Other versions such as Anti­dis­establish­ment­arian­istically and Pseudo­anti­dis­establish­ment­arian­ism are demonstrably longer, though, showing that "popular acceptance" is not a guarantee of accuracy. (See also the "Constructions" section below.)

The word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, also spelled pneumono­ultra­microscopic­silico­volcano­koniosis, is defined as "a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica or quartz dust." At 45 letters (a "p45" word for logologists) , it is certainly the longest word ever to appear in a non-technical dictionary of English, Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary (multiple editions). However, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "a factitious word ... occurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word" and the Encyclopedia Britannica does not have an entry for it.

Words that do exist but are often considered non-words

James Joyce, known for his distinctive style, made up nine 100- and one 101-letter long words in his novel Finnegans Wake, the most famous of which is Bababadal­gharagh­takammin­arronn­konn­bronn­tonn­erronn­tuonn­thunn­trovarrhoun­awnskawn­toohoo­hoordenen­thurnuk. Appearing on the first page, it allegedly is the symbolic thunderclap representing the fall of Adam and Eve. As this word appears nowhere else except in reference to this passage, it is generally not accepted as a 'real' word. Sylvia Plath made mention to that word in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar as Esther Greenwood, the protagonist, was reading Finnegans Wake.

The well-known song title from the movie Mary Poppins, "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", with 34 letters, does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun, and defined in reference to the song title. Hence it may well be dismissed as not a "real" word, particularly since the song assigns no meaning to it other than to say it's impressive.

Other long words

The longest word cited by the Guinness Book of Records, which allegedly represents the name for human mitochondrial DNA, is more than 207,000 letters long. Some types of DNA could have as many as a billion letters if fully written out.

The longest legal Scrabble word (it exceeds 15 letters, the width of a Scrabble board) in North American play is ethyl­enediamine­tetra­acetates (28 letters). It is the plural of a word found in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, which was the dictionary of reference in North American Scrabble play for base words of at least 10 letters, and their inflections of at least 10 letters, until June 16, 2003. There are many 15-letter words; the highest-scoring word on a Scrabble board is oxyphenbutazone when played across all 3 triple word scores.

The longest word which appears in William Shakespeare's works is the 27-letter honorificabilitudinitatibus, appearing in Love's Labour's Lost. This is arguably an English word (rather than Latin), but only because he used it.

The humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua‘a, or reef triggerfish, is Hawaii's official state fish[2]. At 21 letters (22 counting the okina) it is one of the best known very long one-word names for an animal. It is often asserted that "the name is longer than the fish."

The character Big Bird of Sesame Street sings the Latin alphabet, thinking it is a word. He reads abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz aloud as /æbkədɛfgiʤɛkl̩mn̩ɔpkwɝːˈstuːvwɪksɪz/ and breaks into song (ABC-DEF-GHI).

In the 1970s, there were advertisements for Lip­smackin­thirst­quenchin­acetastin­motivatin­good­buzzin­cool­talkin­high­walkin­fast­livin­ever­givin­cool­fizzin Pepsi, coining a 100-letter term. In 1975, the 71-letter Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun was used in a McDonald's Restaurant advertisement to describe the Big Mac.

Although only fourteen letters long, sesquipedalian deserves a mention. It is derived from a nonce word used by the Roman author Horace, in his work Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). The quote is as follows: "Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba," which means, "He throws aside his paint pots and his words that are a foot and a half long". The Oxford English dictionary lists sesquipedalianism ("the practice of using words one and a half feet long"), and further derivations can be created as described in the "Constructions" section below.

Words with certain characteristics of notable length

The longest word in the English language containing only one vowel is strengths, while scraunched is the longest monosyllabic word in current usage. Twyndyllyngs is the longest word without any of the common vowel letters a, e, i, o, or u (although y is certainly a vowel in that and many other words). Euouae, at six letters long, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels. It is a medieval musical term. However, u was often used interchangeably with v, and the variant "evovae" is occasionally used.

The longest words with no repeated letters are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightable. [3]

The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus. The seven-letter addeems (from the archaic verb addeem, meaning to award), alloquy (an archaic or literary word for an address), beefily (in a beefy manner), billowy (like a wave or surge), dikkops (a South African bird) and gimmors (plural of gimmor, an old-fashioned word for a mechanical contrivance) are also close.

The longest medical term typable with only the left hand (using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard) is aftercataracts, and the longest "common" word is stewardesses or reverberated. Conversely, using the right hand alone, the longest word that can be typed is johnny-jump-up, or, excluding hyphens, polyphony. The longest word typable using only the top row of letters is not typewriter, as is commonly believed: proterotype and rupturewort are longer, though not in common usage.

The longest words typable by alternating left and right hands are dismantlement and neuroticisms respectively.

The longest words with the vowels in order are facetiously and abstemiously.

Constructions

English is a language which permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes and suffixes. This is sometimes referred to as agglutinative construction. This process can create arbitrarily long words: for example, the prefixes pseudo- (false, spurious) and anti- (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired. Multiple observers have played on this in noting that a word like anti-aircraft (pertaining to the defense against aircraft) is easily extended to anti-anti-aircraft (pertaining to counteracting the defense against aircraft, a legitimate concept) and can from thereon be prefixed with an endless stream of "anti-"s, each time creating a new level of counteraction. It also must be noted that the concept of double negatives does not apply here; for instance, anti-anti-aircraft does not reduce to simply aircraft, it specifically pertains to counteracting the defense against aircraft.

The earlier mentioned "antidisestablishmentarianism" is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction. The stepwise construction is as follows:

establish

to set up, put in place, or institute (originally from the Latin stāre, to stand)

dis-establish: ending the established status of a body, in particular a church, given such status by law, such as the Church of England

disestablish-ment

the separation of church and state (specifically in this context it is the political movement of the 1860s in Britain)

anti-disestablishment

opposition to disestablishment

antidisestablishment-arian

an advocate of opposition to disestablishment (alternatively, but less likely and quite similar in meaning, "opposed to disestablishmentarians", depending on what "anti-" is taken to belong to)

antidisestablishmentarian-ism

the movement or ideology of advocates of opposition to disestablishment; the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment

Of course, the process need not stop there: prefixes like neo- and contra- can be added, and -istically can be used in place of -ism. The words so created are increasingly more contrived, however, and given that there is essentially no limit to their length (unless artificial constraints are introduced, such as not using any prefix more than once), it is dubious whether any of them can lay a claim to being the "longest" word.

Constructing long words in agglutinative languages for humorous effect is a practice as old as the languages themselves. In his play Assemblywomen, the ancient Greek comedic poet Aristophanes created a word of 183 letters describing a dish by stringing together its ingredients.

Henry Carey's farce Chrononhotonthologos (1743) holds the opening line: "Aldiborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?"

Technical terms

A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.

Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis is sometimes cited as the longest binomial name—it is a kind of amphipod. However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one sex­millia­quingent­sexagint­illion, coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 10^3(6560+1) = 10¹⁹⁶⁸³. In British usage, it would be 10^6(6560) = 10³⁹³⁶⁰.

Names of chemical compounds can be extremely long if written as one word, which is sometimes done. An example of this is sodium­meta­diamino­para­dioxy­arseno­benzoe­methylene­sulph­oxylate, an arsenic-containing drug. There are also other chemical naming systems, using numbers instead of "meta", "para" etc. as descriptive dividers, breaking up the name, which then no longer can be considered a single long word.

The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to such words as Methionyl­threonyl­threonyl­...­isoleucine (189,819 letters), Methionyl­alanyl­threonyl­...­leucine (64,060 letters), Methionyl­glutaminyl­...­serine (1913 letters), and Acetyl­seryl­tyrosyl­seryl­isol­...­serine (1185 letters).

Place names

There is some debate as to whether or not a place name is a legitimate word. However, the longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is Taumatawhakatang­ihangakoauauot­amateaturipukaka­pikimaunga­horonuku­pokaiwhenuak­itanatahu (85 letters) which is a hill in New Zealand.

The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a lake in Massachusetts. In Algonquin this is said to mean "you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle". The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are Winchester-on-the-Severn, a town in Maryland, and Washington-on-the-Brazos, a notable place in Texas history.

The station sign at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in North Wales

The 58 character name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the famous name of a town in Anglesey in the United Kingdom. This place's name is actually 51 letters long, as certain character groups in Welsh are considered as one letter, for instance ll, ng and ch. It is generally agreed, however, that this invented name, adopted in the mid-19th century, was contrived solely to be the longest name of any town in Britain. The official name of the place is Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll, commonly abbreviated to "Llanfairpwll" or the somewhat jocular "Llanfair PG". The longest station name in the UK, at 68 letters, is also in Wales: Gorsafawddacha'idraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion was specifically contrived to "beat" Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

In Ireland, the longest English placename at 22 letters is Muckanaghederdauhaulia (from the Irish language, Muiceanach idir dhá sháile, meaning pig-marsh between two saltwater inlets) in County Galway. If this is disallowed for being derived from Irish, or not a town, the longest at 19 letters is Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow.

It is questionable whether any of the above (with the exception of New­town­mount­kennedy) are properly considered English words, being derived from Māori, Nipmuck, Welsh and Irish words respectively, or being a conjunction of individual English words.

See also: List of short place names

Jokes

A popular joke answer to the "longest word" question is the word smiles, credited as the longest word because there is a mile between each s. Of course, by this reckoning the word beleaguered, which contains a league, is even longer.

A popular playground joke in Britain states that the longest word in the English language is elastic because it will always stretch.

According to some, the longest word is the "word" after the sentence "And now, a word from our sponsors," because in radio advertisements, this phrase is conventionally followed by a rapid string of explanation equivalent to fine print in paper ads.

See also

• English language
• One-letter English words
• Two-letter English words
• List of the longest English words with one syllable

References

• Sesquipedalian. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971)
• Typewriter Words
• Fun With Words: Word Odditieshahahhdaskodjhaoihdawdbnasjdbnjaksbdaksdjalsdjaospdjasjdaksdlagjkakljdasd