Longest word in English

Most commonly, length is based on orthography (conventional spelling rules) and counting the number of written letters.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary does not contain antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters), as the editors found no widespread, sustained usage of the word in its original meaning.

Consisting of a series of Latin words meaning "nothing" and defined as "the act of estimating something as worthless"; its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741.

[17] A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is uncharacteristically, at 20 letters.

[18] In his play Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazousae), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients: Henry Carey's farce Chrononhotonthologos (1743) holds the opening line: "Aldiborontiphoscophornio!

Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, when the protagonist was reading Finnegans Wake.

The English language permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes and suffixes.

This process can create arbitrarily long words: for example, the prefixes pseudo (false, spurious) and anti (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired.

For example, the wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs,[19] so the sequence of one of its strands, if written out in full like Adenilyl­adenilyl­guanilyl­cystidylthymidyl . . .

However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature in 1929 after being petitioned by Mary J. Rathbun to take up the case.

Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is the longest accepted binomial name for any animal, or any organism visible with the naked eye.

[24] The word is composed of the following elements: The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu (85 letters), which is a hill in New Zealand (see the signpost photo on this page).

In Canada, the longest place name is Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde, a township in Ontario, at 61 letters or 68 non-space characters.

[27] The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are Winchester-on-the-Severn, a town in Maryland, and Washington-on-the-Brazos, a notable place in Texas history.