What is the longest sentence in a published English language work?

Answer 1

The Longest Sentence in Literature
Many people attribute the longest sentence in literature to Victor Hugo. The claim is that a sentence in Les Miserables, 823 words long, earns that title.

The source most often given for this, if a source is given, is Timothy Fullerton's Triviata: A Compendium of Useless Information, published in 1975.

Unfortunately, Fullerton was in error. At best, it is the longest sentence in French literature, though I can't confirm that.* Traditionally, the longest sentence in English Literature has been said to be a sentence in Ullyses by James Joyce, which clocks in at 4,391 words. Past editions of The Guinness Book of World Records have listed this record.

However, Joyce's record has recently been surpassed. Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club, published in 2001, contains a sentence with 13,955 words. I believe he currently holds the record in "English Literature."

However hold on to your seats...

There is also, apparently, a Polish novel, Gates of Paradise, with a 40,000 word sentence. I have been unable so far to find absolute confirmation on an author. Bramy Raju, written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, and published in 1960, translates as Gates of Paradise, but it has been described as a novella. And while there is no absolute definition of that term, novellas are usually shorter than 40,000 words.

Finally, there is a Czech novel that consists of one long sentence -- Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal. It is this novel that Coe has said inspired his 13,955 word sentence. Hrabal's 'novel sentence' is 128 pages long, though I have been unable to find an exact word count. It most likely takes the award for longest sentence. Even if it doesn't, it dwarfs Hugo's significantly.

-- John Newmark - Nov, 2003

*Aug 2004 -- I have received an email stating that Sodom et Gomorrhe, Volume 4 of À la Recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust contains a sentence that's 847 words long in the original French. If this is true, Hugo doesn't hold the French literature record.

Answer 2

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RE:
What is the longest sentence in a published English language work?

Answer 3

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There is no absolute limit on the length of an English sentence. A sentence describing successive numbers, for example, could stretch to infinity, and one concatenating clauses with grammatical conjunctions such as and could go on as long as material may be supplied. Thus, at least one linguistics textbook concludes that "there is no longest English sentence".Another way to extend sentences indefinitely is by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, or of successive extensions of the formThis highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded. As for published work, it is an open matter as to what should be considered an admissible sentence. Joyce's entries listed below could have been much shortened by the addition of a few full stops, with arguably little effect. CONTENDERS 1,287 words - The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words. 12,931 - The last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, consists of two sentences. The first one is 11,281 words long, and the second is 12,931 words long. 13,955 - In 2001 Jonathan Coe had a 13,955-word sentence in his novel, The Rotters' Club.[4] 2,403,109 - A single sentence spans Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19 of Nigel Tomm's absurdist work The Blah Story. [5]. Most of this sentence consists of repetitions of the word "blah". Volume 19 consists mostly of a single 3,609,750-letter word, itself an agglutination of many previously known long words. 3,000,000 - Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love, marketed as the world’s longest published novel in English, features a sentence that contains about 3 million words of the 17 million-word book.[6][7]

Answer 4

I'm not sure of the exact wording, but my vocabulary book has it. It had the longest word in the world, containing over a thousand letters, and some other words along with it. It was in a scientific magazine. Does this help much?

Answer 5

I don't know, but it was probably by James Joyce (Ulysses) which I could not read.

Answer 6

Very interesting and a great question as well. I will be checking this out to see.