The other day while we were in the car Alex asked, “What’s the longest word?” We were listening to the Mary Poppins soundtrack at the time and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was playing which got him thinking about it.

Off the top of my head I wasn’t sure but thought I remembered hearing a long time ago that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest but I wasn’t sure.

So, like all good puzzlers I turned to Google and eventually ended up on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Longest word in the English Language.

Like with just about everything in the English language it turns out that the longest word depends on the rules you want to use.

The longest word in a major dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is defined by Oxford English Dictionary to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.” In case you haven’t taken the time to count it contains 45 letters. This is classified as both a “technical” and “coined” word.

There are actually two technical words, both longer then I care to reprint that are 189,819 letters long which some appear to believe isn’t a word at all, and the longest published word at 1,909 letters long. I’m discounting these since they are technical words.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the word that started all of this, comes in at 34 letters long but is just a made up so in our quest continues.

The longest non-coined word in an English dictionary, but still a technical word is Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism with 30 letters.

The first non-coined, non-technical word I came across was in fact Antidisestablishmentarianism with 28 letters.

Of course at this point my curiosity got the better of me and Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the longest words in other languages. I know in German you can make big words by stringing together smaller words and leaving out the spaces.

For example whole numbers are written as one word so, Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig, 777,777, is pretty darn long at 65 letters. (And just for Doug, using his favourite German number, fünfhundertfünfundfünfzigtausendfünfhundertfünfundfünfzig, 555,555, but that’s only 57 letters). Imagine being in grade school and having to write out the expanded notion of numbers on a test, you’d run out of time or get writers cramp.

Anyone have any favourite long words?