The name dwarfs the creature, which has a length of just over 10 millimeters. The longest accepted animal binomial, at 42 letters, is a species of soldier fly native to Thailand. Parastratiosphecomyia Stratioshecomyioides The longest word in the dictionary is, therefore, somewhat open to interpretation. Francis even points out that there’s a 100-character “word” hiding under lincomycin, but that’s a chemical name. So the first entry under hamburger, for example, contains a 55-letter word, with nary a space in sight: “You are asked if you will have ‘porkchopbeefsteakhamandegghamburgersteakorliverandbacon.’” Allowing for any non-space punctuation, under the word journey there’s this behemoth from 1938: “feeling-upset-physically-and-mentally-with-anticipatory-excitement-and/or-anxiety”-71 letters (and some hyphens and a slash but no spaces). ![]() As explained in a 1997 article by Darryl Francis in the journal Word Ways, dictionaries-especially the Oxford English Dictionary-have the defined words but also quotations to show usage. While pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is often given as the longest word in a dictionary, it’s not that straightforward. Despite its inclusion in the dictionary, it’s generally considered superfluous, having been coined simply to claim the title of the longest English word. An inflated version of silicosis, this is the vaguely scientific-sounding name for a disease that causes inflammation in the lungs owing to the inhalation of very fine silica dust. PneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosisĪt 45 letters, this is the longest defined word you’ll find in a major dictionary. Nirantarāndhakāritā … lokānĪccording to Guinness World Records, the longest word in any language is a "compound 'word' of 195 Sanskrit characters (transliterating to 428 letters in the Roman alphabet) describing the region near Kanci, Tamil Nadu, India, which appears in a 16th-century work by Tirumalãmbã, Queen of Vijayangara.”ģ. For example, naming a single molecule of DNA, with its millions and millions of repeating base pairs, could eventually tap out at well over 1 billion letters. The problem with including chemical names is that there’s essentially no limit to how long they can be. All told, the full chemical name for the human protein titin is 189,819 letters, and takes up to three-and-a-half hours to pronounce. Methionylthreonylthreonyglutaminylarginyl. Here are some examples of the longest words by category. At 28 letters, the word-which is defined as a 19th-century British political movement that opposes proposals for the disestablishment of the Church of England-is still regarded as the longest non-medical, non-coined, nontechnical word in the English language (though according to Merriam-Webster, it’s rarely used outside of being "a really long word"). ![]() Antidisestablishmentarianism, everyone’s favorite agglutinative, entered the pop culture lexicon on August 17, 1955, when Gloria Lockerman, a 12-year-old girl from Baltimore, correctly spelled it on The $64,000 Question as millions of people watched from their living rooms.
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