English for Students

English : Longest Words

What are the Longest Words in the dictionary?

The longest word listed in a dictionary is usually a disease. That word that we have come across is:

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis.

It is a word containing 45 letters! Please don't ask me how you pronounce it! If you come across a longer word, please do let me know.

Here is another example of a Long Word which contains 34 letters.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Besides, We do have genuine examples in our files.

Ther are:

Antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) and Floccinaucinihilipilification(29 letters)

These words are listed in some of our larger dictionaries. Other words (mainly technical ones) recorded in the complete Oxford English Dictionary includes:

otorhinolaryngological (22 letters)
immunoelectrophoretically (25 letters)
psychophysicotherapeutics (25 letters)
thyroparathyroidectomized (25 letters)
pneumoencephalographically (26 letters)
radioimmunoelectrophoresis (26 letters)
psychoneuroendocrinological (27 letters)
hepaticocholangiogastrostomy (28 letters)
spectrophotofluorometrically (28 letters)
pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters)
Triskaidekaphobia (17 letters)

Most of those words are merely inventions and when they occur it is almost always as examples of long words, rather than as genuine examples of use.

For example, the medieval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas (honourableness) was listed by some old dictionaries in the English form honorificabilitudinity (22 letters), but it has never really been in use.

In Voltaire's Candide, Pangloss is supposed to have given lectures on metaphysico-theologo-cosmonigology (34 letters). In Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Headlong Hall (1816) there appear two high-flown nonce words (one-off coinages) which describe the human body by stringing together adjectives describing its various tissues. The first is based on Greek words and the second on the Latin equivalents.

They are osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous (44 letters) and osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary (51 letters) which translate roughly as of bone, flesh, blood, organs, gristle, nerve and marrow.