What is the longest word?

Answer 1

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. English allows new words to be formed by construction; long words are frequently coined; place names may be considered words; technical terms may be very long. It is difficult to know where to draw the line. Note also that length is defined in terms of orthography and number of written letters, not phonology and the number of phonemes.



Major dictionaries
The longest word in any major English language dictionary is pneumono­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis, a 45-letter word supposed to refer to a lung disease, but research has discovered that this word was originally intended as 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.[1]

The Oxford English Dictionary contains pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).

The longest non-technical word 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.[2][3][4] In recent times its usage has been recorded in the proceedings of the United States Senate by Senator Robert Byrd [5], and at the White House by Bill Clinton's press secretary Mike McCurry, albeit sarcastically.[6]

Anti­dis­establishment­arianism (a nineteenth century movement in England opposed to the separation of church and state) at 28 letters is still in colloquial currency for being one of the longest words in the English language.

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 it was Shakespeare who used it.

The humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua‘a, or reef triggerfish, is Hawaii's official state fish.[7] At 22 letters (including the okina) it is one of the best known very long one-word names for an animal. It is occasionally quipped that the name is longer than the fish.

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.

Coinages
In his play Assemblywomen, the ancient Greek comedic poet Aristophanes created a word of 183 letters describing a dish by stringing together its ingredients, lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

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.

Mark McShane's Untimely Ripped (1963) contains praetertranssubstantiationalistically (37 letters).[8]

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.

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. [9]

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).

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

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:

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. Given that there is essentially no limit to their length, it is dubious whether any of them can lay a claim to being the "longest" word.

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, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr Edward Strother (1675-1737)[10]. The word is composed of the following elements:

Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo[2])
Salino: containing salt (Latin, salīnus)
Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
Ceraceo: "waxy" (Latin, cera)
Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
Cupreo: from Copper
Vitriolic: containing vitriol (in this case Copper sulphate pentahydrate)
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 103(6560+1) = 1019683. In British usage, it would be 106(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).[11

Answer 2

I thought it was prestidigitation, but then I remembered something I saw in guiness once.

LONGEST WORD
According to the Guiness book of World Records, the longest word ever to occur in a literary work has to do with a fricassee, with 17 sweet and sour ingredients, including brains, honey vinegar, fish, pickles, and ouzo. The word appears in The Ecclesiazusae, a satirical comedy by Aristophanes (443-388? BC), an Athenian playwright. In Greek, the word is 170 letters, transliterated into English it is 182 letters.

Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotri mmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossy phophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiola goiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

Answer 3

antidisestablishmentarianism

this is meant to be the longest word in the English language.

Answer 4

probably the name of this town in wales that's 58 letters long, it's called
llanfair pwllgwyngwll gogerych wyrndrobwll llantysilio gogogoch
(without the spaces, otherwise yahoo answers won't show it)
i'm serious, that's the correct spelling of the place, and i'ts readable too. google it if you don't believe me--you're bound to find a pronounciation guide as well.

Answer 5

TYPEWRITER is the longest word you can type using only one row of the keyboard.

Answer 6

Supercalifragilisticexpealodocious!

Answer 7

Supercalifragelisticespealidocius!

Answer 8

pneumono­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis - LUNG DISEASE. 45 LETTERS

Answer 9

it starts with a p
but i dont know how to spell it

Answer 10

Elastic, because it can stretch!

Answer 11

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - i think it's a lung disease