Longest word in English


The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared.
Words may be derived naturally from the language's roots or formed by [|coinage] and [|construction]. Additionally, comparisons are complicated because [|place names] may be considered words, [|technical terms] may be arbitrarily long, and the addition of suffixes and prefixes may extend the length of words to create grammatically correct but unused or novel words.
The length of a word may also be understood in multiple ways. Most commonly, length is based on orthography and counting the number of written letters. Alternate, but less common, approaches include phonology and the number of phonemes.
WordLettersMeaningClaimDispute
189,819Chemical name of titin, the largest known proteinLongest known word overall by magnitudes, takes three and a half hours to pronounce.Technical; not in dictionary; whether this is a word is disputed
Methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamyl...serine1,909Chemical name of E. coli TrpA Longest published wordTechnical
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsano...pterygon182A fictional dish of foodLongest word coined by a major author, the longest word ever to appear in literatureContrived nonce word; not in dictionary; Ancient Greek transliteration
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis45The disease silicosisLongest word in a major dictionaryTechnical; contrived coinage to make it the longest word
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious34Unclear in source work, has been cited as a nonsense wordMade popular in the Mary Poppins film and musicalContrived coinage
Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism30A medical disorderLongest non-contrived word in a major dictionaryTechnical
29The act of regarding something as unimportantLongest unchallenged nontechnical wordContrived coinage
Antidisestablishmentarianism28The political position of opposing disestablishmentLongest non-contrived and nontechnical wordNot all dictionaries accept it due to lack of usage.
Honorificabilitudinitatibus27The state of being able to achieve honoursLongest word in Shakespeare's works; longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowelsLatin

Major dictionaries

The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis. The word was deliberately coined to be the longest word in English, and 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.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary does not contain antidisestablishmentarianism, as the editors found no widespread, sustained usage of the word in its original meaning. The longest word in that dictionary is '.
The longest non-technical word in major dictionaries is ' 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.
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.
The word internationalization is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last.

Creations of long words

Coinages

In his play Assemblywomen, the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters, which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients:


Henry Carey's farce Chrononhotonthologos holds the opening line: "Aldiborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?"
Thomas Love Peacock put these creations into the mouth of the phrenologist Mr. Cranium in his 1816 romp Headlong Hall: osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous and osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary.
James Joyce made up nine 100-letter words plus one 101-letter word 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.

Agglutinative constructions

The English language 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 and anti can be added as many times as desired. A word like anti-aircraft is easily extended to anti-anti-aircraft 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. In musical notation, an 8192nd note may be called a semihemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemiquaver.
Antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction.

Technical terms

A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.
The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine for the protein also known as titin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. In nature, DNA molecules can be much bigger than protein molecules and therefore potentially be referred to with much longer chemical names. For example, the wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs, so the sequence of one of its strands, if written out in full like Adenilyladenilylguanilylcystidylthymidyl..., would be about 8 billion letters long. The longest published word, Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso...serine, referring to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus, is 1,185 letters long, and appeared in the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, the Chemical Abstracts Service overhauled its naming system and started discouraging excessively long names. In 2011, a dictionary broke this record with a 1909-letter word describing the trpA protein.
John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one ', coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 103 = 1019683. Under the long number scale, it would be 106 = 1039360.
' 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 in 1929 after being petitioned by Mary J. Rathbun to take up the case.
Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is the longest accepted binomial name. It is a species of soldier fly. The genus name Parapropalaehoplophorus is two letters longer, but does not contain a similarly long species name.
, at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother. The word is composed of the following elements:

Place names

The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu, which is a hill in New Zealand. The name is in the Māori language. A longer and widely recognised version of the name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, which appears on the signpost at the location. In Māori, the digraphs ng and wh are each treated as single letters.
In Canada, the longest place name is Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde, a township in Ontario, at 61 letters or 68 non-space characters.
The longest non-contrived place name in the United Kingdom which is a single non-hyphenated word is Cottonshopeburnfoot and the longest which is hyphenated is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe.
The longest place name in the United States is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means "Fishing Place at the Boundaries – Neutral Meeting Grounds" 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 Webster Lake. 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 longest official geographical name in Australia is Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya. It has 26 letters and is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning "where the Devil urinates".
In Ireland, the longest English place name at 19 letters is Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow.

Personal names

Guinness World Records formerly contained a category for longest personal name used.
Long birth names are often coined in protest of naming laws or for other personal reasons.