This is the longest word in NOAD, the Concise OED, and many other dictionaries. This strings together a sequence of Latin words that were taught at Eton College: flocci, nauci, nihili, pili (meaning ‘at little value’), with the -fication suffix tacked on. Image Credit: ‘Birds eye view of Eton College’ by David Loggan, published in his ‘Cantabrigia Illustrata’ of 1690 Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Ī stunt word with a more distinguished pedigree is the 29-letter floccinaucinihilipilification, ‘the action or habit of estimating as worthless,’ dating back to 1741. Now it’s in a number of dictionaries, including the OED. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (34 letters) was a stunt word too, specifically created for a song in Mary Poppins, but the film version of the musical was popular enough that everyone got to know the word. The 33-letter word in the title of this post, hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism, is even more self-referential, since it’s used to describe words that are enormously long (or sesquipedalian, literally ‘a foot and a half long’).You won’t find that in any dictionary, since it’s nothing more than a flashy “stunt word.” Then again, P45 started its life as a stunt word and then managed to find its way into dictionaries, so you never know. Indeed, both the OED and the Shorter OED now warn readers that P45 is factitious, occurring only as an example of an ultra-long word.Īnd that’s the problem with many of the “longest word” candidates: you only ever encounter them in discussions of very long words. Smith, presented it as “the longest word in the English language.” But there’s not a shred of evidence that the word was used in medical literature before Smith unveiled it at the NPL meeting and the press picked up on the fanciful story. The NPL’s president at the time, Everett M.
As described in an article in the magazine Word Ways, the word appears to have been invented on the occasion of a 1935 meeting of the National Puzzlers League in New York. There’s only one problem with P45, as it’s known to its friends: it’s most likely a fabrication. One of the best-known long-word pioneers! Image Credit: ‘Mary Poppins at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, CA’, Photo by Jonnyboyca, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.īut as Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower pointed out in another context, promoting the “Lexical Item of the Year” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) By those standards, the longest word that has entered any major English dictionary is this 45-letter whopper: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, meaning ‘a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.’ You can find it under the prefix pneumono- in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
(When the New Oxford American Dictionary named carbon neutral the 2006 Word of the Year, there were numerous complaints that this is actually two words. That’s a rather arbitrary distinction, but it accords with most people’s judgments of wordhood. Let’s say that a “word” is a single lexical item that is unbroken by spaces or hyphens. But there are many other worthy candidates for the “longest word” mantle.įirst, some ground rules.
My stock answer isn’t very interesting: “It depends on what counts as a ‘word,’ and it depends on the dictionary.” That answer doesn’t satisfy most people, since the follow-up question is typically something like, “No, really, is it antidisestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” Those two specimens are the “usual suspects” that get hauled out in discussions of the longest word in English, perhaps because most of us have been familiar with them since grade school. One question I often field in my capacity as OUP’s editor for American dictionaries is, “What’s the longest word in the dictionary?” I don’t hear it as often as “How do I get a new word in the dictionary?” but it still comes up from time to time.