You may have heard people claim the longest word in the English language is “antidisestablishmentarianism,” a dusty old term that’s the “opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established church.” With 28 letters and 12 syllables, it is certainly a mouthful, but it isn’t necessarily the lengthiest. Bury your head deep into the murky corners of the complete English lexicon and you’ll find that much longer words exist.
The word that takes three hours to say
Some people contend that the longest word in English has 189,819 letters, starting with “methionyl…” and ends with “…isoleucine.” As tempting as it is, we won’t be typing the word out in the full as it will take hours upon hours.
In 2017, YouTube behemoth posted a video in which he mumbles through the entirety of the word and he clocked in just under 2 hours. Other attempts have reportedly taken up to 3 hours.
The word is the full chemical name of Titin, the largest known protein that’s made up of over 34,000 amino acids. It’s so unbelievably long because it’s essentially listing all the amino acids in the chain that form the protein.
However, it might not be strictly accurate to call this a “word”. You won’t find it in any dictionary as such names are “verbal formulae” as opposed to actual words.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
If you want a less controversial contender, “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” is said to be the longest word currently listed in Oxford dictionaries. This is a 45-letter word that refers to a lung disease caused by inhaling tiny silica particles from a volcanic eruption.
Once again, some purists may take issue with the inclusion of this word as it’s a technical term that’s not used in day-to-day communication.
Furthermore, some argue that the word is contrived – that is to say, the people who created the word intentionally made it ridiculously long to break records. Indeed, it wasn’t organically coined by a doctor or scientist, but in the 1930s by Everett M Smith, the former president of the National Puzzlers’ League.
The world’s longest word
Beyond English, many other languages host stupendously extended words.
German is well-known for its compound words where numerous words are stuck together like Lego bricks. With 63 letters, Germany’s longest was “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”, which described a law developed in 1999 during to regulate beef labeling in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
By 2013, however, the BSE problem was largely controlled and , consigning the word to the dustbin of history. Today, the longest word you’ll find in a German dictionary is “Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung”, which has something to do with car insurance.
According to the , the longest word in the world features 195 characters, transliterating to 428 letters in the Latin alphabet. Used to describe the Tamil Nadu region of India, it goes something like this: ——————————————————