From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of a word and of length.
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 (conventional spelling rules) and counting the number of written letters. Alternate, but less common, approaches include phonology (the spoken language) and the number of phonemes (sounds).
Word | Letters | Meaning | Claim | Dispute |
---|---|---|---|---|
methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanyl…isoleucine | 189,819 | The chemical composition of titin, the largest known protein | Longest known word overall by magnitudes. Attempts to say the entire word have taken two[1] to three and a half hours.[2] | Technical; not in dictionary; whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed |
methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamyl…serine | 1,909 | The chemical name of E. coli TrpA (P0A877) | Longest published word[3] | Technical |
lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsano…pterygon | 183 | A fictional dish of food | Longest word coined by a major author,[4] the longest word ever to appear in literature[5] | Contrived nonce word; not in dictionary; Ancient Greek transliteration |
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis | 45 | The disease silicosis | Longest word in a major dictionary[6] | Contrived coinage to make it the longest word; technical, but only mentioned and never actually used in communication |
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious | 34 | Unclear in source work, has been cited as a nonsense word | Made popular in the Mary Poppins film and musical[7] | Contrived coinage |
pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism | 30 | A hereditary medical disorder | Longest non-contrived word in a major dictionary[8] | Technical |
antidisestablishmentarianism | 28 | The political position of opposing disestablishment | Longest non-contrived and nontechnical word[9] | Not all dictionaries accept it due to lack of usage.[10] |
honorificabilitudinitatibus | 27 | The state of being able to achieve honors | Longest word in Shakespeare’s works; longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels[11] | Latin |
Major dictionaries
The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters), a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles,[12] 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[citation needed] in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.[6]
The Oxford English Dictionary contains pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary does not contain antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters), as the editors found no widespread, sustained usage of the word in its original meaning. The longest word in that dictionary is electroencephalographically (27 letters).[13]
The longest non-technical word in major dictionaries 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.[14][15][16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
The word internationalization is abbreviated «i18n», the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last.[19][20][21]
Creations of long words
Coinages
In his play Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazousae), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients:
Henry Carey’s farce Chrononhotonthologos (1743) 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 book Headlong Hall: osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous (44 characters) and osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary (51 characters).
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 (false, spurious) and anti (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired. More familiarly, the addition of numerous «great»s to a relative, such as «great-great-great-great-grandparent», 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,[22] 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 (P03575), is 1,185 letters long, and appeared in the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966.[23] 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 (P0A877).[3]
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. Under the long number scale, it would be 106(6560) = 1039360.
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 in 1929 after being petitioned by Mary J. Rathbun to take up the case.[24]
Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis is the longest accepted binomial name for an organism. It is a bacterium found in soil collected at Llanfairpwllgwyngyll (discussed below). Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is the longest accepted binomial name for any animal, or any organism visible with the naked eye. It is a species of soldier fly.[25] The genus name Parapropalaehoplophorus (a fossil glyptodont, an extinct family of mammals related to armadillos) is two letters longer, but does not contain a similarly long species name.
Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother (1675–1737).[26] The word is composed of the following elements:
- Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo[27])
- Salino: containing salt (Latin, salinus)
- Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
- Ceraceo: waxy (Latin, cera)
- Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
- Cupreo: from «copper»
- Vitriolic: resembling vitriol
Notable long words
Place names
The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (85 letters), which is a hill in New Zealand. The name is in the Māori language. A widely recognized version of the name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (85 letters), which appears on the signpost at the location (see the photo on this page). 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.[28]
The 58-letter name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the name of a town on Anglesey, an island of Wales. In terms of the traditional Welsh alphabet, the name is only 51 letters long, as certain digraphs in Welsh are considered as single letters, for instance ll, ng and ch. It is generally agreed, however, that this invented name, adopted in the mid-19th century, was contrived solely to be the longest name of any town in Britain. The official name of the place is Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, commonly abbreviated to Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG.
The longest non-contrived place name in the United Kingdom which is a single non-hyphenated word is Cottonshopeburnfoot (19 letters) and the longest which is hyphenated is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe (29 characters).
The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) 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.[29] 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 single-word town names in the U.S. are Kleinfeltersville, Pennsylvania and Mooselookmeguntic, Maine.
The longest official geographical name in Australia is Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya.[30] It has 26 letters and is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning «where the Devil urinates».[31]
Liechtenstein is the longest country name with single name in English. The second longest country name with single name in English is Turkmenistan. There are longer country names if one includes ones with spaces.
Personal names
Guinness World Records formerly contained a category for longest personal name used.
- From about 1975 to 1985, the recordholder was Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvoralternwarengewissenhaftschaferswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangreifendurchihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenwanderersteerdemenschderraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelchegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevonverstandigmenschlichkeitkonntefortplanzenundsicherfreuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum, Senior (746 letters), also known as Wolfe+585, Senior.
- After 1985 Guinness briefly awarded the record to a newborn girl with a longer name. The category was removed shortly afterward.
Long birth names are often coined in protest of naming laws or for other personal reasons.
- The naming law in Sweden was challenged by parents Lasse Diding and Elisabeth Hallin, who proposed the given name «Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116» for their child (pronounced [ˈǎlːbɪn], 43 characters), which was rejected by a district court in Halmstad, southern Sweden.
Words with certain characteristics of notable length
- Schmaltzed and strengthed (10 letters) appear to be the longest monosyllabic words recorded in The Oxford English Dictionary, while scraunched and scroonched appear to be the longest monosyllabic words recorded in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary; but squirrelled (11 letters) is the longest if pronounced as one syllable only (as permitted in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary at squirrel, and in Longman Pronunciation Dictionary). Schtroumpfed (12 letters) was coined by Umberto Eco, while broughammed (11 letters) was coined by William Harmon after broughamed (10 letters) was coined by George Bernard Shaw.
- Strengths is the longest word in the English language containing only one vowel letter.[32]
- Euouae, a medieval musical term, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels. However, the «word» itself is simply a mnemonic consisting of the vowels to be sung in the phrase «seculorum Amen» at the end of the lesser doxology. (Although u was often used interchangeably with v, and the variant «Evovae» is occasionally used, the v in these cases would still be a vowel.)
- The longest words with no repeated letters are dermatoglyphics and uncopyrightable.[33]
- The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus. However, this is arguably a proper noun. There are several six-letter English words with their letters in alphabetical order, including abhors, almost, begins, biopsy, chimps and chintz.[34] There are few 7-letter words, such as «billowy» and «beefily». The longest words whose letters are in reverse alphabetical order are sponged, wronged and trollied.
- The longest words recorded in OED with each vowel only once, and in order, are abstemiously, affectiously, and tragediously (OED). Fracedinously and gravedinously (constructed from adjectives in OED) have thirteen letters; Gadspreciously, constructed from Gadsprecious (in OED), has fourteen letters. Facetiously is among the few other words directly attested in OED with single occurrences of all six vowels (counting y as a vowel).
- The longest single palindromic word in English is rotavator, another name for a rotary tiller for breaking and aerating soil.
Typed words
- The longest words typable with only the left hand using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard are tesseradecades, aftercataracts, dereverberated, dereverberates[35] and the more common but sometimes hyphenated sweaterdresses.[34] Using the right hand alone, the longest word that can be typed is johnny-jump-up, or, excluding hyphens, monimolimnion[36] and phyllophyllin.
- The longest English word typable using only the top row of letters has 11 letters: rupturewort. The word teetertotter (used in North American English) is longer at 12 letters, although it is usually spelled with a hyphen.
- The longest using only the middle row is shakalshas (10 letters). Nine-letter words include flagfalls; eight-letter words include galahads and alfalfas.
- Since the bottom row contains no vowels, no standard words can be formed. [37]
- The longest words typable by alternating left and right hands are antiskepticism and leucocytozoans respectively.[34]
- On a Dvorak keyboard, the longest «left-handed» words are epopoeia, jipijapa, peekapoo, and quiaquia.[38] Other such long words are papaya, Kikuyu, opaque, and upkeep.[39] Kikuyu is typed entirely with the index finger, and so the longest one-fingered word on the Dvorak keyboard. There are no vowels on the right-hand side, and so the longest «right-handed» word is crwths.
See also
- Lipogram
- List of long species names
- List of the longest English words with one syllable
- Longest English sentence
- Longest word in French
- Longest word in Romanian
- Longest word in Spanish
- Longest word in Turkish
- Number of words in English
- Scriptio continua
- Sesquipedalianism
- Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, longest published word in German
References
- ^ «Reading The Longest English Word (190,000 Characters)». YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-11-10. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
- ^ «World’s longest word takes 3.5 hours to pronounce». CW39 Houston. 2012-12-08. Retrieved 2020-05-18.
- ^ a b Colista Moore (2011). Student’s Dictionary. p. 524. ISBN 978-1-934669-21-1.
- ^ see separate article Lopado…pterygon
- ^ Donald McFarlan; Norris Dewar McWhirter; David A. Boeh (1989). Guinness book of world records: 1990. Sterling. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-8069-5790-6.
- ^ a b Coined around 1935 to be the longest word; press reports on puzzle league members legitimized it somewhat. First appeared in the MWNID supplement, 1939. Today OED and several others list it, but citations are almost always as «longest word». More detail at pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
- ^ «Merriam Webster: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious».
- ^ «What is the longest English word?». AskOxford. Archived from the original on 2008-10-22. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
- ^ «What is the longest English word?». oxforddictionaries.com.[dead link]
- ^ «Merriam Webster: «Antidisestablishmentarianism is not in the dictionary.»«.
- ^ «Cool, Strange, and Interesting Facts,» fact 99. InnocentEnglish.com. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
- ^ «pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – definition of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis in English from the Oxford dictionary». oxforddictionaries.com. Archived from the original on 2012-07-19.
- ^ «The Longest Word in the Dictionary» (Video). Ask the Editor. Merriam-Webster. Archived from the original on 21 November 2013. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
- ^ «Floccinaucinihilipilification» by Michael Quinion World Wide Words Archived 2006-08-21 at the Wayback Machine;
- ^ The Guinness Book of Records, in its 1992 and previous editions, declared the longest real word in the English language to be floccinaucinihilipilification. More recent editions of the book have acknowledged pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. What is the longest English word? — Oxford Dictionaries Online Archived 2006-08-26 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ In recent times its usage has been recorded in the proceedings of the United States Senate by Senator Robert Byrd Discussion between Sen. Moynihan and Sen. Byrd «Mr. President, may I say to the distinguished Senator from New York, I used that word on the Senate floor myself 2 or 3 years ago. I cannot remember just when or what the occasion was, but I used it on that occasion to indicate that whatever it was I was discussing it was something like a mere trifle or nothing really being of moment.» Congressional Record June 17, 1991, p. S7887, and at the White House by Bill Clinton’s press secretary Mike McCurry, albeit sarcastically. December 6, 1995, White House Press Briefing in discussing Congressional Budget Office estimates and assumptions: «But if you – as a practical matter of estimating the economy, the difference is not great. There’s a little bit of floccinaucinihilipilification going on here.»
- ^ Eckler, R. Making the Alphabet Dance, p 252, 1996.
- ^ «Longest Common Words – Modern». Maltron.com. Archived from the original on 27 April 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
- ^ «Glossary of W3C Jargon». World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 2008-10-25. Retrieved 2008-10-13.
- ^ «Origin of the Abbreviation I18n». Archived from the original on 2014-06-27.
- ^ «Localization vs. Internationalization». World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 2016-04-03.
- ^ Paux et al. (2008) Science, Vol. 322 (5898) 101-104. A Physical Map of the 1-Gigabase Bread Wheat Chromosome 3B Paux, Etienne; Sourdille, Pierre; Salse, Jérôme; Saintenac, Cyrille; Choulet, Frédéric; Leroy, Philippe; Korol, Abraham; Michalak, Monika; Kianian, Shahryar; Spielmeyer, Wolfgang; Lagudah, Evans; Somers, Daryl; Kilian, Andrzej; Alaux, Michael; Vautrin, Sonia; Bergès, Hélène; Eversole, Kellye; Appels, Rudi; Safar, Jan; Simkova, Hana; Dolezel, Jaroslav; Bernard, Michel; Feuillet, Catherine (2008). «A Physical Map of the 1-Gigabase Bread Wheat Chromosome 3B». Science. 322 (5898): 101–104. Bibcode:2008Sci…322..101P. doi:10.1126/science.1161847. PMID 18832645. S2CID 27686615. Archived from the original on 2015-09-03. Retrieved 2012-12-01.
- ^ Chemical Abstracts Formula Index, Jan.-June 1964, Page 967F; Chemical Abstracts 7th Coll. Formulas, C23H32-Z, 56-65, 1962–1966, Page 6717F
- ^ «Opinion 105. Dybowski’s (1926) Names of Crustacea Suppressed». Opinions Rendered by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: Opinions 105 to 114. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Vol. 73. 1929. pp. 1–3. hdl:10088/23619. BHL page 8911139.
- ^ rjk. «World’s longest name of an animal. Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides Stratiomyid Fly Soldier Fly». thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com. Archived from the original on 2011-11-17. Retrieved 2011-12-17.
- ^ cited in some editions of the Guinness Book of Records as the longest word in English, see Askoxford.com on the longest English word
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ «GeoNames Government of Canada site». Archived from the original on 2009-02-06.
- ^ Belluck, Pam (2004-11-20). «What’s the Name of That Lake? It’s Hard to Say». The New York Times.
- ^ «Geoscience Australia Gazetteer». Archived from the original on 2007-10-01.
- ^ «South Australian State Gazetteer». Archived from the original on 2007-10-01.
- ^ «Guinness Records».
- ^ «Longest Word Without Repeating Letters». December 2014.
- ^ a b c «Typewriter Words». Questrel.com. Archived from the original on 2010-09-27. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
- ^ «Science Links Japan | Two Unique Aftercataracts Requiring Surgical Removal». Sciencelinks.jp. 2009-03-18. Archived from the original on 2011-02-17. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
- ^ «Dictionary entry for monimolimnion, a word that, at 13 letters, is longer than any of the words linked in the source above». Archived from the original on 2009-09-09. Retrieved 2009-08-15.
- ^ «Word Records». Fun-with-words.com. Archived from the original on 2012-08-26. Retrieved 2012-08-13.
- ^ «Typewriter Words». Wordnik.com. Archived from the original on 2011-07-17. Retrieved 2011-01-15.
- ^ «The Dvorak Keyboard and You». Theworldofstuff.com. Archived from the original on 2010-08-20. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
External links
This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 8 January 2011, and does not reflect subsequent edits.
- A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia – Long words
- Long words (chemical names)
- Long words (place names)
- What is the longest English word?, AskOxford.com «Ask the Experts»
- What is the Longest Word?, Fun-With-Words.com
- Full chemical name of titin.
- Taxonomy of Wordplay
Home
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FAQ
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Which is the longest word consisting of only vowels?
Which is the longest word consisting of only vowels?
Longest English word consisting only of vowels. Share. Euouae, at six letters long, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and, also, the word with the most consecutive vowels. Words with five consecutive vowels include cooeeing and queueing.
Are there any words with five consecutive vowels?
Words with five consecutive vowels include cooeeing and queueing. Euouae — medieval musical term which indicates the vowels of the syllables of “seculorum Amen,” which ends the “Gloria Patri.”.
Which is the longest word with 11 letters?
The longest English word typable using only the top row of letters has 11 letters: rupturewort. Similar words with 10 letters include: pepperwort, perpetuity, proprietor, requietory, repertoire, tripertite, pourriture and (fittingly) typewriter.
Which is the longest word in the UK?
The longest non-contrived place name in the United Kingdom which is a single non-hyphenated word is Cottonshopeburnfoot (19 letters) and the longest which is hyphenated is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe (29 characters).
Which is the word with the most vowels?
The English dictionary word with the most consecutive vowels (six) is EUOUAE. Words with five consecutive vowels include QUEUEING, AIEEE, COOEEING, MIAOUED, ZAOUIA, JUSSIEUEAN, ZOOEAE, ZOAEAE.
Words with five consecutive vowels include cooeeing and queueing. Euouae — medieval musical term which indicates the vowels of the syllables of “seculorum Amen,” which ends the “Gloria Patri.”.
Which is the longest word with only one consonant?
Many Vowels. OUENOUAOU (a stream in the Philippines) has nine letters but only one consonant. It is the longest known place name with only a single consonant. The English dictionary word with the most consecutive vowels (six) is EUOUAE.
What is the longest word without any vowels?
The longest common word without any of the five vowels is RHYTHMS, but there are longer rare words: SYMPHYSY, NYMPHLY, GYPSYRY, GYPSYFY, and TWYNDYLLYNGS. WPPWRMWSTE and GLYCYRRHIZIN are long words with very few vowels. ASTHMA begins and ends with a vowel and has no other vowels in between.
Do you want to impress your friends with the longest English words? This blog is for you! Some of these words aren’t used very often, but some of them are quite common and you will absolutely be able to use them whenever you’re speaking English.
- The longest word in English
- The longest word in the dictionary
- The longest words we actually use
- The longest word with one syllable
- The longest word with one vowel
Learn languages at your pace
The longest word in English
The actual longest word in English is unfortunately so long that I can’t write it here. It has 189,819 letters and takes over three hours to say! We don’t have time for that. And thankfully, it isn’t a word you’re likely to use because it’s the chemical name for titin. Here’s a very brief snapshot: meth…ucine. Just add 189,810 letters in between.
The longest word in the dictionary
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in any major English dictionary. It refers to a lung disease which can also be called silicosis. Why the long version then? Because it was deliberately made up to be the longest word in the English dictionary. The longest non-technical, non-medical word in an English dictionary is the 29-letter floccinaucinihilipilification. This is a Latin word that means the act of estimating that something is worthless.
The longest words we actually use
You might have realized you’ve never heard anyone use any of the words we’ve mentioned so far. That has nothing to do with your level of English – most native speakers don’t know those words either! The longest words you will see in a normal English text are counterrevolutionaries and deinstitutionalisation, both with 22 letters. Another, with 21 letters, is incomprehensibilities, meaning things which are impossible to understand. The longest word we use regularly in everyday speech is probably uncharacteristically, at 20 letters.
Learn languages at your pace
The longest word with one syllable
Brits and Americans are going to argue over this one. Because of our different pronunciations, we don’t agree on what is the longest one-syllable word in English. People from the US and Canada might tell you that it’s the word squirrel(l)ed. This has ten or eleven letters, again depending on where you’re from. While our transatlantic friends pronounce this something like ‘squirld’ (ˈskwərld), Brits pronounce the word squirrelled with two syllables: ‘squir-relled’ (ˈskwir-əld). I don’t want to say who’s wrong or right but… we are learning British English here.
There are several longest words with one syllable in British English and they all have nine letters: screeched, scratched and strengths are just three of them. (We’re going to see strengths again in a bit – it’s our word of the day today.)
The longest word with only vowels
Euouae wins this category. With six letters, it is the longest word in English with only vowels. However, ask an English person what this word means and they probably won’t have a clue. It’s a musical word from medieval times, so not a massively useful term to know for most of us.
The longest word without a vowel
People argue over this one because it’s hard to agree on what is or isn’t a vowel. If we take the standard English definition that there are five vowels – a e i o u – then rhythms is the longest English word without a vowel. But some people will say that the y in rhythm acts as a vowel.
Another worthy contender for this category is the word tsktsks. That doesn’t look much like English, does it? It’s more of a sound than a word and it’s sometimes spelt tsk-tsks, but tsktsks is allowed in Scrabble so I think it counts. It’s similar to a tut-tut sound of disapproval.
The longest word with one vowel
Strengths! Our word of the day is back. Strengths, with nine letters, is the longest word in English with only one vowel. A fairly close rival is schnapps, which has eight letters; so let’s raise a glass to it, and to all of the long words we’ve met today, and say ‘cheers’.
Which of these long words do you think you’ll be able to use in your next English conversation?
Learn languages at your pace
Laura is a freelance writer and was an ESL teacher for eight years. She was born in the UK and has lived in Australia and Poland, where she writes blogs for Lingoda about everything from grammar to dating English speakers. She’s definitely better at the first one. She loves travelling and that’s the other major topic that she writes on. Laura likes pilates and cycling, but when she’s feeling lazy she can be found curled up watching Netflix. She’s currently learning Polish, and her battle with that mystifying language has given her huge empathy for anyone struggling to learn English. Find out more about her work in her portfolio.
Before we get into words with one vowel, let us know about the English Alphabet first.
The present English alphabet consists of 26 letters, each of which has an upper- and lower-case version. It was derived from Latin script in the 7th century. Letters have been added or removed since then, resulting in the current Modern English alphabet, which consists of 26 letters with no diacritics, digraphs, or special characters. The Greek alphabet’s first two letters, alpha and beta, are combined to form the word alphabet.
Evolution of the English language
With waves of attack and eventual occupation by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, the evolution of spoken English began in the fifth century. They spoke the same West Germanic language, but their dialects were different. Their mingling resulted in the creation of a new Germanic language known as Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.
The Vikings raid and settle in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, bringing with them a different dialect of the same Germanic language, now known as Old Norse. The fusion of English and Viking would be the second phase in forming spoken English, and the foundation for today’s diverse English dialects.
Further vowel alterations occurred during the Middle English period. The Great Vowel Shift (c. 1500 CE) was the most profound, transforming the sound of all long vowels. The considerable changes in pronunciation between “short” mat, met, bit, cot vs. “long” mate, mete/meet, bite, coat happened after the spelling system was fixed. Other changes that left echoes in modern language include homorganic lengthening before ld, mb, nd, which accounts for the long vowels in child, mind, climb, and other words; pre-cluster shortening, which accounts for vowel alternations in child vs. children, keep vs. kept, meet vs. met; and trisyllabic laxing, which accounts for alternations such as grateful vs. gratitude, divine.
The emergence of rhotic and non-rhotic accents (i.e. “r-dropping”), the trap-bath split in many dialects of British English, and the flapping of t and d between vowels in American and Australian English are among the more notable recent modifications to the language.
Vowels
A vowel is a syllabic spoken sound that is pronounced without any vocal tract stricture. Vowels are one of the two main types of speech sounds, with consonants being the other. The quality, loudness, and number of vowels varies (length). They are usually voiced and play an important role in prosodic variation like tone, intonation, and emphasis.
The word vowel is derived from the Latin word vocalis, which means “to speak” (i.e. relating to the voice).
The word vowel is frequently used in English to refer to both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y).
The phonological definition of “vowel” may not always match the phonetic definition (i.e. a sound produced without constriction in the vocal tract) (i.e. a sound that forms the peak of a syllable). The approximants [j] and [w] show this: both have little constriction in the vocal tract (thus phonetically they appear to be vowel-like), but they occur at the beginning of syllables (e.g., in “yet” and “wet”), implying that they are consonants phonologically. In rhotic dialects, there is a similar controversy over whether a word like bird has an r-colored vowel / or a syllabic consonant /.
Consonant
A consonant is a sound that is not a vowel in speech. It also refers to the letters of the alphabet that represent certain sounds: consonants include Z, B, T, G, and H.
All non-vowel sounds, or their equivalent letters, are consonants: A, E, I, O, U, and occasionally Y are not consonants. H and T are consonants in hat. A consonant can also be used as an adjective to indicate things that appear to be compatible, or things that are “agreeable.” You may remark that a country’s aid offer is in line with its treaties. Consonant sounds are pleasant to hear in music, as opposed to “dissonant” sounds, which are unpleasant.
Linguists have invented systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each confirmed consonant because the number of speech sounds in the world’s languages is significantly greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet. Because there are fewer consonant letters in the English alphabet than there are consonant sounds in the English language, digraphs like ch, sh, th, and ng are employed to extend the alphabet, however some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelt th in “this” is not the same as the sound spelled th in “thin.
Examples of words with Only One Vowel
Call, Crab, Curb, Herb, Ghost, Strap, Harp, Sharp, Thrash, Crash, Splash, Thrush, Wrench, Worth, Wrath, Frost, First, Froth, Start, Broth, Birth, Blast, Draft, Drift, Graft, Grass, Girth, Host, Hurt
world, happy, sixty, month, fifty, party, Kelly, forty, words, watch, thing, light, story, Night, glory, candy, puppy, chris, birth, plant, smart, jelly, black, cycle, truth, bully, truck, smith, sorry, Henry, penny, North, Tyler, worth, crazy, dress, cross, march, belly, scent, harry, clock, start, right, molly, witch, think, socks, catch, storm, berry, rhyme, sally,
Holly, graph, Brown, stick, daddy, lucky, lunch, child, Nancy, fight, trust, craft, chess, skull, swing, stand, worry, sight, short, clown, grand, shark, first, drink, wrong, Dylan, shell, track, jenny, crown, small, block, wings, stars, frown, grant, Scott, blast, poppy, ghost, gabby, smell, fresh, Trent, chest, fancy, Brady, lengths,mightn’t, mustn’t, schnapps, scratch, splotch, strength, strengths, stretch , that’ll, this’ll, twelfth, twelfths.
sport, billy, twerp, perry, Tracy, twist, jolly, nasty, hyper, press, larry, patch, mercy, class, terry, stock, sting, chant, bench, birds, brand, sloth, worst, tommy, Egypt, blitz, wrist, jimmy, kitty, nanny, Clark, butch, punch, snack, stuck, yacht, ranch, marry, tasty, works, Twins, ninth, hatch, porch, chick, ditch, cards, frank, bobby, lungs.
These are only the FIVE_LETTER_WORDS with one vowel. There are many more.
Coming to the longest word with One vowel its Strengths.
Strengths is the longest word in the English language with only one vowel, with nine letters.
In the English language, what word contains only one vowel that appears six times?
Indivisibility.
Have you ever wondered what the longest word in the English language is? Did you think back to childhood days and recall Mary Poppins describing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as a word used when you have nothing else to say? Well, bear in mind that this 34-letter word isn’t officially recognized as being a true English word. So, where does that leave us?
What is the longest word in the dictionary?
The longest non-technical word found in the dictionary is Floccinaucinihilipilification. The term is used to describe something of worthless value. This is ironic because this 29 lettered word serves little purpose, except when used as an example of a long word. It certainly isn’t used in everyday English.
Coming in at just 28 letters, and one that most people would be able to pronounce is the word antidisestablishmentarianism. The term was originally used to describe opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England. In modern times, the word is used in a more general sense and refers to opposing the withdrawal of government support from a particular church or religion.
The longest accepted technical word to appear in a Standard English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. At 45 letters in length, this word is considered superfluous. It describes a medical condition of the lungs caused by the inhalation of fine silica dust. The term was coined by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers’ League to capture the longest word in the English dictionary.
If you are looking for a truly long word, consider that it has 189,819 letters. It would take you more than three hours to pronounce correctly, that’s if you were able to pronounce it in its entirety without a mistake and did not have to start from the beginning again.
The abbreviation is Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl…isoleucine. Since this post has no intention of being the longest blog post ever, the full word will not be shown. If you’re truly interested in this word, you can watch it being pronounced on YouTube.
Good luck with trying to sit through the entire video or attempting to rattle it off to your friends since it takes over three hours to pronounce. It basically describes a type of protein which provides elasticity in muscles.
What is the longest place name?
The longest place name from an English speaking country is 85 letters in length. Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu is a Maori word for a particular hill in New Zealand.
What is the longest town name?
With just 58 letters, the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the longest name of a town or city in the world. It translates as St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio of the red cave. The abbreviation Llanfair PG. is usually employed and the town was so named to be the longest place name in Britain.
What is the longest word with only vowels?
The longest word to contain only vowels is euouae. Although the word only comprises six letters, it has the distinction of holding two Guinness World Records. These are for being the longest word consisting exclusively of vowels, as well as being the word with the most consecutive vowels. Although this word is not commonly used, it refers to a musical term from the medieval times.
What is the longest word with only consonants?
The longest word to contain only consonants is tsktsk. This word is used fairly frequently in modern times. It means to express disapproval or disdain. For example, if a young child is thinking about doing something bad and looks at you before doing it, you could tsktsk.
What is the longest word with alternating vowels and consonants?
The longest word consisting of alternating consonants and vowels is honorificabilitudinitatibus. Yes, you can double check that if you want to. The word means “with honorableness” and is 27 letters in length. Do not attempt to pronounce this word while under the influence of alcohol.
What is the longest palindrome?
The longest palindrome, or word which is spelled the same forward and backward, is rotavator. A rotavator is a type of soil plow and the word is made up of 9 letters. You checked that too, didn’t you?
What is the longest word to use all 5 vowels only once and in alphabetical order?
The longest word to use all 5 vowels only once and in alphabetical order is abstentious. It refers to one who does not indulge in the excessive intake of food, alcohol or narcotics. You certainly checked that.
Conclusion
There are many other really long words. Many of these are very technical or are words used to describe chemical composition. For example, a DNA strand could run into several thousand letters. However, these technical terms often contain numerals or letters from the Greek alphabet. As such they are not considered to be true English words.
Although these words all contain a stupendous amount of letters, for those who still like childhood riddles, by far the longest word of all is smiles. Why is this? Because it has a MILE between the first and last letters, silly!
(Photo courtesy of John Earl)