The longest word in English
Ask what the longest word in English is and you will get four different answers, all of them correct. Which one you want depends on what you think a word is.
Here they all are, shortest to silliest.
The one in the dictionary: 45 letters
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
It is a lung disease you get from breathing in very fine ash from a volcano. Break it up and it explains itself:
- pneumono — lung
- ultramicroscopic — too small to see, even with a microscope
- silico — silicon, the stuff in sand and ash
- volcano — volcano
- coniosis — a disease caused by dust
So: a lung disease caused by breathing volcanic dust too fine to see.
There is a catch, and it is a good one. The word was made up on purpose in 1935 by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League, specifically so that there would be a very long word. Doctors do not use it. They call the illness silicosis, which is nine letters. It got into dictionaries because people kept asking about it, not because anyone needed it.
The one people actually use: 28 letters
Antidisestablishmentarianism.
This one is real. In nineteenth-century Britain there was a movement to remove the Church of England’s official status — that was disestablishmentarianism — and people who opposed that movement were antidisestablishmentarianists.
It is built the way English builds long words: a small root with a queue of pieces on either end.
establish → establishment → disestablishment → disestablishmentarian → disestablishmentarianism → antidisestablishmentarianism
Every step is a normal English move. That is why this one feels like a real word and the volcano one does not.
The one that is technically longest: 189,819 letters
The full chemical name of the protein titin is 189,819 letters long and takes about three and a half hours to read out.
Almost nobody counts it. Chemical names are built by a formula — you describe every part of the molecule in order, and the name comes out the other end. By that logic there is no longest word, only a longest molecule, and somebody can always find a bigger one. Dictionaries leave them out, and so does everybody sensible.
The longest word you could put in a puzzle
Long words are useless in word games. You never have the letters.
What actually wins games is knowing the short words cold — and there is a second list worth having, which is long words with common letters. These turn up far more often than their length suggests:
- strengths — nine letters, one vowel
- rhythms — seven letters, no vowels at all
- queueing — five vowels in a row
- uncopyrightable — fifteen letters, and no letter repeats
- subdermatoglyphic — seventeen letters, no letter repeats, and the longest word anyone has found that manages it
A few more that get asked about
Floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) — the habit of deciding something is worthless. Made up at Eton as a joke about long words, which makes it a long word about long words.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (34 letters) — from Mary Poppins. It is in some dictionaries now, on the grounds that enough people know it.
Honorificabilitudinitatibus (27 letters) — the longest word in Shakespeare, from Love’s Labour’s Lost. It means “the state of being able to receive honours”, and it has the odd property that its letters alternate consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel the whole way through.
So what is the answer?
If somebody asks you at a pub quiz, say pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis — that is the answer they want.
If you want the honest one, say antidisestablishmentarianism, because it is the longest word English built for itself out of pieces it already had, rather than one somebody assembled to win an argument about long words.
Play with some letters
You cannot use any of these in a word game, but you can find out what your letters really make. The anagram solver here searches a 172,000-word dictionary and shows you every word that fits, longest first.
Or try Anagrove, the daily word game here. Six letters, five ordinary words to find, then every other word hiding in the same six — usually about forty. The longest one is only ever six letters, which turns out to be much harder than it sounds.