What’s the longest ever word in literature? The longest word in the English language (leaving literature to one side for a moment) is a staggering 189,819 letters long. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.
The chemical formula for the protein otherwise known as titin runs to 189,819 letters, but whether this constitutes a ‘word’ is a moot point. Science abounds in long formulae like this, but are such formations really ‘words’? We have to turn to literature to find the bona fide,non-specialist tonguebusters.
There is a word for those who are scared of long words: hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.There is also a word for somebody who is fond of using long words: sesquipedalian. It stems from the Latin for ‘a foot and a half’, and was first used to denote someone who is given to longwordiness in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1853 workCranford (or at least this is the earliest instance the Oxford English Dictionaryhasyet managed to unearth). But then literature itself can be a place where long words can be formed, disseminated, and popularised.
Take the work of James Joyce, for instance, whoseFinnegans Wake(1939) contains several 100-letter words, and even one of 101 letters. On the very first page of the novel, Joyce uses the 100-letter wordBababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk, which is meant to denote the symbolic thunderclap which accompanied the Fall of Adam and Eve (a meaning that is imbued with greater significance in light of Joyce’s lifelong fear of thunder).
Meanwhile, Thomas Love Peaco*ck coined two words,osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous(44 letters) andosseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary(51 letters),in his novelHeadlong Hall (1816). The words roughly translateas ‘of bone, flesh, blood, organs, gristle, nerve, and marrow’ and describe the human body.
Earlier in literature, we find an interesting 50-letter word in Francois Rabelais’ sixteenth-century workGargantua and Pantagruel.The word appears in the title of a made-up book that appears on the library shelves in Rabelais’ ribald tale. The title of the book isAntipericatametaanaparcircumvolutiorectumgustpoops of the Coprofied. All we’ll say here is that this title – and the long word in it – reflect the scatological flavour of the book as a whole.
Shakespeare himself used a nonce-word,honorificabilitudinitatibus, in his early playLove’s Labour’s Lost. It refers to the state or position of being able to achieve honours. This word is the longest in English to comprise alternating consonants and vowels (which, if nothing else, is a fine pub quiz fact). The word is known as a ‘hapax legomenon’ – a word or phrase which appears only once in an author’s work.
This nonce-word was used by Baconians – those who claim that Francis Bacon wrote the plays, rather than the man from Stratford – to support their theory: honorificabilitudinitatibus is an anagram ofhi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, which translates into English as ‘these plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world’ (simple, eh?).
However, did Shakespeare coin this word, after all?Honorificabilitudinitatibus appears in a work by Thomas Nashe – the first person to use the word ’email’ in 1594 – in 1599, shortly after Shakespeare wroteLove’s Labour’s Lost, and earlier variants of this long word had been in circulation since the Middle Ages.
Although from a musical rather than a book, the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is worth mentioning here because, whilst it was used in the 1964 filmMary Poppins, similarly spelled variants of the word, such as supercalafajalistickespeealadojus,existed earlier, since at least 1949.
The longest word in all of literature, however, is this offering from Aristophanes’ playAssemblywomen:Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon. At 183 letters, it exceeds even Joyce’s lengthy coinages. It is the name for a fictional food dish containing meat, fish, and wine. Yum!
If you enjoyed this feast of long words, check out our synonyms for the word ‘drunk’ and our collection of fearsome phobias.
