What Is the Longest Word in the World? Three Ways to Count

In February 1935, Everett M. Smith was president of the National Puzzlers’ League, and a long-time member later credited him with a word 45 letters long. At the opening session of the league’s 103rd semi-annual meeting, held at the Hotel New Yorker on 22 February, the puzzlers recognized that word as the longest in the English language.

They explained that it named a special form of silicosis, caused by ultra-microscopic particles of volcanic dust. Silicosis has nine letters.

What is the longest word in the world?

The longest word in the world, counted by letters, is the chemical name of the protein titin, often quoted at 189,819 letters, though dictionaries treat it as a formula. Guinness World Records names a Sanskrit compound of 195 characters (428 Roman letters). The longest word in a major English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, at 45 letters.

Contender	Length	Standing
Titin’s chemical name	189,819 letters as usually quoted; 241,578 for the canonical sequence	A chemical formula, outside the dictionaries
Sanskrit compound in the Varadambika Parinaya	195 Sanskrit characters, 428 Roman letters	The Guinness World Records holder
The 45-letter dictionary word	45 letters	Recognized by puzzlers in 1935
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious	34 letters	A song title from the film Mary Poppins
pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism	30 letters	A technical term recorded in the OED
floccinaucinihilipilification	29 letters	First recorded in 1741
antidisestablishmentarianism	28 letters	Genuine, Oxford says, “if rather obviously deliberate”

The 45-letter word entered English through a puzzle league

The next morning’s New York Herald Tribune carried the story on page 3, under the headline “Puzzlers Open 103rd Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word.” It spelled the word with a k, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, and reported that it replaced electrophotomicrographically, at 28 letters, as the longest word the league recognized. The New York Times covered it the same morning: “Puzzlers Adopt Tongue Twister.”

Chris Cole made the case against the word in 1989 in the journal Word Ways, in an article titled “The Biggest Hoax”. His source, the long-time member David Shulman, said only that the word “was used by Everett M. Smith,” and described Smith as news editor of The Christian Science Monitor. Cole allowed that Smith might have offered it as an example of medical “word inflation.” Searches of the medical literature before 1935 had found no use of it, though, so “it appears that Smith did not cite the word, he coined it.”

Puzzle-makers have shaped word lore before: the “because Poe wrote on both” answer to the Hatter’s riddle traces to Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles, published in 1914, three years after his death.

Dictionaries followed the newspapers. By 1939 the word was in the New Words section of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, still spelled with a k, according to Jeff Miller’s collection of long words. It went on into Webster’s Third and the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which Miller quotes: “a factitious word alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust’ but occurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word.”

Silicosis, in the words of the CDC, “is a lung disease caused by inhaling excessive amounts of respirable crystalline silica.” The volcanic part of the word has thinner support. A 2006 review of the respiratory hazards of volcanic ash found no reported human cases of silicosis or other chronic lung disorders from volcanic ash in the papers it covered, though very few of those studies tracked long-term health. It did report an estimated risk of early signs of silicosis on Montserrat if ashfalls there went on for more than 10 years.

Titin’s name is a formula with no fixed length

Titin is a giant muscle protein, and its chemical name strings its amino acids together in order, from methionyl at the start to isoleucine at the end. Oxford’s language experts set out where such names stand on their AskOxford site: “The formal names of chemical compounds are almost unlimited in length,” and “Dictionary writers tend to regard such names as ‘verbal formulae’, rather than as English words.”

Titin comes in several sizes, each with its own name. The 189,819-letter version on Wiktionary spells out a form of 26,926 amino acids, the length of the small N2-B form found in heart muscle.

The UniProt protein database gives the canonical sequence for human titin as 34,350 amino acids, and spelled out the same way, that version’s name runs to 241,578 letters. UniProt adds that the full-length protein may reach 38,138 residues.

Guinness gives the record to a word by a 16th-century queen

Guinness World Records notes that in many languages, “lengthy compound words can be written in the closed-up style of a single word.” Its record holder is what Guinness itself calls a compound ‘word’ of 195 Sanskrit characters, which transliterates to 428 letters in the Roman alphabet. It appears in the Varadambika Parinaya, a 16th-century work by Tirumalamba, a queen of the Vijayanagara empire, about the marriage of the king Achyuta Deva Raya.

The chapter it comes from, about the Tundira country in today’s Tamil Nadu, reads in full, Guinness says: “On the way, he passed through the Tundira country.” In the Sanskrit, “the Tundira country” is preceded by 25 adjectives, and one of them holds the record. In Guinness’s translation it describes how “the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls,” rays that outshone the water, scented with cardamom, clove, saffron, camphor and musk, flowing from the pitchers of maidens seated in water-sheds.

Oxford’s best-known long words were deliberate too

“Most of the words which are given as ‘the longest word’ are merely inventions, and when they occur it is almost always as examples of long words, rather than as genuine examples of use,” Oxford’s experts wrote on AskOxford.

The two non-technical long words they counted as genuine, antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) and floccinaucinihilipilification (29), came with a caveat: “if rather obviously deliberate.” The same page lists longer technical words recorded in the OED, up to pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).

Floccinaucinihilipilification means “the action or habit of judging something to be worthless,” Michael Quinion explains, and somebody built it “as a learned joke” from four Latin words for “of little or no value” listed in an Eton College grammar book. Its first recorded use is in a 1741 letter by William Shenstone. It was the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary until the puzzlers’ word “edged it out in the second.”

AskOxford traces this kind of verbal game, “so far as records attest,” to the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes. The 1486 list that gave English an unkindness of ravens played a similar game, supplying terms for gentlemen to use in careful speech.

The longest word in English dictionaries reached them by way of a puzzlers’ meeting, and the OED says it occurs chiefly as an example of a very long word. Strictly FYI.