LINGUISTICS
The Never Ending Search for the Longest Word
Why the Quest is Doomed to Failure
What is the longest word in English? Some candidates commonly proferred in reply to this question are:
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (from Disney’s Mary Poppins)
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (Made-up word for lung disease)
Antidisestablishmentarianism (Actually has a meaning)
Of these three candidates, pneuomonoultra… etc. is the longest in the above list, as one can tell just by eyeing the words or comparing their respective lengths.
Other languages provide longer candidates; the Athenian playwright Aristophanes coined the following monstrosity for a fictional Greek dish:
German is also notorious for having very long words:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (“beef-labeling-supervision-duties-delegation-law”)
Weltgesundheitsorganisation (“World Health Organization”)
The question of “what is the longest word?,” whether in a particular language (what is the longest English word?) or in general, is an interesting/fun/cocktail-party question in its own right. The question is, however, somewhat misguided.
The reason is simply because words can be constructed on a whim. Languages come with rules governing how words can be built, and often allow for new words to be created as needed on the fly.
For any candidate “longest word” in English, for instance, a longer word can be derived using the word-building rules of English. Consider the affix “anti-” in English. (“Anti-” is a prefix — affixes can be, at least, prefixes, which attach at the beginning, or suffixes, which attach at the end.) “Anti-” can attach to nouns to form an adjective.
Consider the noun “abortion”; one can be “anti-abortion.” We have taken the noun “abortion,” and attached the prefix “anti-” to it, creating a longer word, now an adjective: “anti-abortion.”
We can, of course, also attach the prefix “anti-” to a noun like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:
anti-pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
This is a grammatical way of expressing one’s attitude as regards this lung disease: “I’m anti-pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”
The affixation of “anti-” to a noun is just one of the many word-building tools English speakers have at their disposal. A basic consequence of this is that there is no such thing as a longest “possible” word in English. (There can always be a longer word!)
There is no longest possible word in English
We should be asking two different questions: First, what is the longest word in English ever written or uttered? And second, what is the longest possible word in English?
What is the Longest Word Written or Uttered?
There is a finite set of uttered or written words in English at any given point in time. One of these words must be the longest! (…At that point in time…)
Given the massive amount of linguistic data published online, it may be a tall order indeed to discover the true longest word ever written by an English speaker. Much harder to find concrete recorded evidence of the longest ever uttered word! Spoken language, after all, is transient. The sentences you say are gone once they’re spoken…
But maybe we don’t need to worry: given how English works, perhaps the task of discovering this “longest word” is a fool’s errand. After all, once we find this longest word ever recorded, English word-building rules would allow us to concoct, on the spot, an even longer word based on that one!
What is the Longest Possible English Word?
There is no longest possible word in English. We’ve seen how nouns can be arbitrarily lengthened by adding the prefix “anti-,” above. We can even repeat this process of prefixation; even though it becomes stylistically redundant, it is still technically grammatical and logical to be “anti-anti-abortion.” (Two negative “anti-”s here make a positive, meaning “pro-abortion.”)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is an adjective — as evidenced by its ending: “-ious,” which typically ends adjectives in English. (For example, “delicious,” “expeditious,” “injudicious,” etc.)
Adjectives take the prefix “un-,” meaning “not,” as in “un-intelligent” (“not intelligent”). Just as something may be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, there should be un-supercalifragilisticexpialidocious things out there. We’ve lengthened this already-very-long word by using one of English’s word-building tools: the capacity to attach a prefix to a word.
It Gets Worse: Compounding
Affixation is one word-building process English speakers have at their disposal to make, well, any word, longer. Compounding is another process where we can take two independent root words and put them together to form a new, single, compound word.
In writing, many English compounds are represented with hyphens, or with no space between the roots, though some are represented with a space between the roots as well:
Joined (no-space) compounds: blackbird, snowball, smartphone
Hyphenated compounds: check-in, clean-cut, over-the-counter
Spaced compounds: post office, hot dog, cell phone
Linguistically, each of these written representations are ways of encoding the exact same linguistic object: a compound word. Regardless of whether there is a space, or a hyphen, or whether the roots are not separated; a compound is a compound is a compound, which means it behaves, linguistically, as a single word.
Compare, for example, the compound noun “blackbird,” with the phrase “black bird.” The compound noun “blackbird” is the common noun for the (perhaps, unfortunately named) species Turdus merula. Importantly, newborn blackbirds are not typically black in color, lacking their adult plumage (they are pink), though we’d still refer to the babies as blackbird babies.
On the other hand, the phrase “black bird,” can stand for any species of bird, provided that it is the color black. Ravens are black birds, but they are not blackbirds! By the same token, we would not refer to featherless hatchling blackbirds as black birds.
The same goes for compounds with spaces between the roots. “hot dog” is a single word in English when it refers to the food item; even though each root is separated by a space, the linguistic status of “hot dog” and “blackbird” is the same: these are both a single word, and not a phrase.
Long-story-short, English has a word building process whereby it can concatenate two root words to form a new word — the process known as compounding. Pretty much any two nouns in English can form a compound!
In addition to the more conventionally familiar compounds mentioned above, it is true that any two random nouns in English, with enough context, can form a Noun-Noun compound. To demonstrate this point, I used this random noun generator, which generated the nouns “scrap” and “sentence.”
These nouns can, together, form a compound: “sentence scrap” which, given the meaning of “sentence” and “scrap” can stand for the concept of a fragment, or incomplete sentence, as when someone says “me too,” perhaps in reply to someone saying something like “I’m tired.”
Perhaps surprisingly, compounding in English can take any number of nouns, with enough context, and create a new compound word. There are, in fact, existing English compounds with even 4 nouns:
Radio talk show host (noun-noun-noun-noun)
Healthcare cost growth benchmark (noun-noun-noun-noun)
Twenty seven Mississippi senators (numeral-noun-noun)
You may be surprised to learn that, in fact, in English, any number of nouns may form a new compound word! Allow me to demonstrate as an illustration.
Using the random noun generator mentioned above, now with a 3 noun parameter, I’m faced with the unwelcome task of generating a compound noun out of “fennel,” “spit,” and “umbrella.”
When putting random nouns together in English to show that this can be a compound, this requires some creativity. I have to paint a picture where the resulting common noun would make sense! So here goes:
Imagine a world where fennel is a staple food item amongst the populace, but a virus has taken hold of the world population that makes anyone who eats fennel violently projectile-vomit their ingested fennel bits along with a lot of saliva and spittle, resulting in a fennel-spit type rain of sorts.
Even so, the population is stubborn, and just decides to continue eating fennel as a staple. To mitigate the projectile-vomiting issue, they adopt the regular use of fennel spit umbrellas, which are specially designed to help avoid being drenched by their comrades’ involuntary bodily effusions at dinner.
The point here is simply that noun-noun compounds like these are a regular part of English word-building. There is, in theory, no upper limit to the number of nouns one could string together to form a new English word, bespoke for some particular context and its communicative needs.
As an exercise, I invite the reader to try this with 4, or 5 nouns using the generator I used above! German is even more offensive than English in its compounding habits. Recall the example from above:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (“beef-labeling-supervision-duties-delegation-law”)
German, unlike English, has no shame in unabashedly treating its compounds orthographically as a single word-on-the-page, with no spaces or hyphens between each root!
Some Takeaways (Take-aways? Take aways?)
Compounding and affixation are just two word-building strategies used in the world’s languages. The study of word structure in linguistics is in the purview of morphology, the study of word structure. There are many other word-building strategies that human languages use besides affixation and compounding.
The upshot of this missive is simply that there is no such thing as a “longest possible word” in languages like English and German, at least, where strategies like affixation and compounding are active.
Show me the longest English word you found, and I can show you a longer derived word from it using the simple word-building rules of English grammar.
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