Longest word in English

The longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes an English word. English allows new words to be formed by construction; long words are coined; place names may be considered words; technical terms may be arbitrarily long. Length can be in terms of orthography and number of written letters or phonology and the number of phonemes.

Word	Letters	Pros	Cons
Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine	189,819	Chemical name of the largest known protein	Technical; not in dictionary; disputed whether it is a word
Lopado...pterygon	183	Longest word coined by a major author	Coined; not in dictionary; Greek transliteration
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis	45	Longest word in a major dictionary	Technical; coined to be the longest word
Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism	30	Longest non-coined word in a major dictionary	Technical
Floccinaucinihilipilification	29	Longest nontechnical word	Coined
Antidisestablishmentarianism	28	Longest non-coined and nontechnical word
Honorificabilitudinitatibus	27	Longest word in Shakespeare's works

Major dictionaries

The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a word which refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano. Research has discovered that this word was originally a hoax. It has since been used in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.

The Oxford English Dictionary contains pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).

The longest non-technical word in major dictionaries is flocci­nauci­nihili­pili­fication at 29 letters. Consisting of a series of Latin words meaning "nothing" and defined as "the act of estimating something as worthless", its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741.

Coinages

In his play Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazousae), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 183 letters which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients:

Lopadotemakhoselakhogameokranioleipsanodrimypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakekhymenokikhlepikossyphophattoperister-alektryonoptokephalliokigklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterýgōn,

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

James Joyce made up nine 101-letter words in his novel Finnegans Wake, the most famous of which is Bababadal­gharagh­takammin­arronn­konn­bronn­tonn­erronn­tuonn­thunn­trovarrhoun­awnskawn­toohoo­hoordenen­thurnuk. Appearing on the first page, it allegedly represents the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve. As it appears nowhere else except in reference to this passage, it is generally not accepted as a real word. Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, when the protagonist was reading Finnegans Wake.

"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", the 34-letter title of a song from the movie Mary Poppins, does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun defined in reference to the song title. The attributed meaning is "a word that you say when you don't know what to say." The idea and invention of the word is credited to songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman.

"The holy Jah" is a 4.4-million-letter word in "Marienbad My Love" by Mark Leach. It is comprised of pieces of various words from the world's faiths and means "god within".

"Babyoubiquitouse...oiletub" is a 2,087,214-letter word which occupies almost all Nigel Tomm's novel The Blah Story, Volume 10 and means something like a girl or a bitch.

Advertising coinages

In 1973, Pepsi's advertising agency Boase Massimi Pollitt used a 100-letter but several-word term "Lip­smackin­thirst­quenchin­acetastin­motivatin­good­buzzin­cool­talkin­high­walkin­fast­livin­ever­givin­cool­fizzin" in TV and film advertising.

In 1975, the 71-letter (but several-word) advertising jingle Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun (read: two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun) was first used in a McDonald's Restaurant advertisement to describe the Big Mac sandwich.

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. 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 there be prefixed with an endless stream of "anti-"s, each time creating a new level of counteraction. More familiarly, the addition of numerous "great"s to a relative, e.g. great-great-great-grandfather, can produce words of arbitrary length.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism" is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction, as follows (the numbers succeeding the word refer to the number of letters in the word):

establish (9)

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

dis-establish (12)

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

disestablish-ment (16)

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

anti-disestablishment (20)

opposition to disestablishment

antidisestablishment-ary (23)

of or pertaining to opposition to disestablishment

antidisestablishmentari-an (25)

an advocate of opposition to disestablishment

antidisestablishmentarian-ism (28)

the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment

The use of additional suffixes could stretch the word to 'antidisestablishmentarianisticalized,' with 36 letters. Of course, the process need not stop there: prefixes like neo- and contra- can be added.

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.

Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother (1675-1737). The word is composed of the following elements:

• Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo)
• Salino: containing salt (Latin, salinus)
• Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
• Ceraceo: waxy (Latin, cera)
• Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
• Cupreo: from "copper"
• Vitriolic: resembling vitriol

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. Under the long number scale, it would be 10^6(6560) = 10³⁹³⁶⁰.

Names of chemical compounds can be extremely long if written as one word, as 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. One example, with 1,185 letters, is a chemical term referring to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus.

The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine, the shortened version of a protein also known as titin, or sometimes connectin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. Its empirical formula is C₁₃₂₉₈₃H₂₁₁₈₆₁N₃₆₁₄₉O₄₀₈₈₃S₆₉₃.

Place names

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

There is some debate as to whether a place name is a legitimate word.

The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahul (85 letters) which is a hill in New Zealand.

The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means "Englishmen at Manchaug at the Fishing Place at the Boundary" and is sometimes facetiously translated as "you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle". The lake is also known as Lake Webster. 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 on Anglesey, an island of Wales. 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 official geographical name in Australia is Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill. It is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning "where the Devil urinates".

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 Maori, Nipmuck, Welsh, Aboriginal and Irish words respectively, or being a conjunction of individual English words.

See also: List of short place names

Scrabble

See also: English words with uncommon properties § Scrabble

Words with certain characteristics of notable length

• Strengths is the longest word in the English language containing only one vowel.
• Rhythms is the longest word in the English language containing none of the five recognised vowels.
• Schmaltzed and strengthed appear to be the longest monosyllabic words recorded in OED; but if squirrelled is pronounced as one syllable only (as permitted in SOED for squirrel), it is the longest.
• Euouae, a medieval musical term, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels. However, the "word" itself is simply a mnemonic consisting of the vowels to be sung in the phrase "seculorum Amen" at the end of the lesser doxology. (Although u was often used interchangeably with v, and the variant "Evovae" is occasionally used, the v in these cases would still be a vowel.)
• The longest words with no repeated letters are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightables.
• The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus.
• The longest words recorded in OED with each vowel only once, and in order, are abstemiously, affectiously, and tragediously (OED). Fracedinously and gravedinously (constructed from adjectives in OED) have thirteen letters; Gadspreciously, constructed from Gadsprecious (in OED), has fourteen letters. Facetiously is among the few other words directly attested in OED with single occurrences of all five vowels and the semivowel y.

Typed words

• The longest words typable with only the left hand using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard are tesseradecades, aftercataracts, and the more common but sometimes hyphenated sweaterdresses. Using the right hand alone, the longest word that can be typed is johnny-jump-up, or, excluding hyphens, hypolimnion.
• The longest English words typable using only the top row of letters are, from the largest to smallest: rupturewort, pepperwort, perpetuity, proprietor, and typewriter. The word teetertotter (used in North American English) is longer, although it is usually spelled with a hyphen.
• The longest words typable by alternating left and right hands are antiskepticism and leucocytozoans respectively.
• On a Dvorak keyboard, the longest "left-handed" words are papaya, Kikuyu, opaque, and upkeep. Kikuyu is typed entirely with the index finger, and so the longest one-fingered word on the Dvorak keyboard. There are no vowels on the right-hand side, and so the longest "right-handed" word is crwth.

Common words in general text

Ross Eckler has noted that most of the longest English words are not likely to occur in general text, meaning non-technical present-day text seen by casual readers, in which the author did not specifically intend to use an unusually long word. According to Eckler, the longest words likely to be encountered in general text are deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each.

A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is uncharacteristically, at 20 letters.

Humour

Smiles, according to an old riddle, may be considered the longest word in English, as there is a mile between the two s's. A retort asserts that beleaguered is longer still, since it contains a league. The riddle and both jocular answers date from the 19th century.

See also

• English words with uncommon properties
• List of the longest English words with one syllable
• Number of words in English
• Scriptio continua
• Longest published word in German
• Longest English sentence

External links

• What is the longest English word?, AskOxford.com "Ask the Experts"
• What is the Longest Word?, Fun-With-Words.com
• A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia - Long words
  • Long words (place names)
  • Long words (chemical names)