A Conversation for Ridiculously Long Words

longest word

Post 1

invisibleknight

1stly you might want to edit this article so the lines that don't need to wrap across the screen don't wrap across.

Your actually word (the chemical) it looks so like a made up word.
glutamin used about 10 times.
phenylalanylalanyl likewise.

this looks so invented off the top of your head and using a cut N paste technique to invent it.

I did a bit of Googling around. The Oxford English Dictionary discredit this word.
According to their web page:-

The longest word currently listed in Oxford dictionaries is rather of this kind: it is the supposed lung-disease pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters).

A 'word' of 1,909 letters cannot be a genuine word but must be a chemical name for the whole of a human chromosome which would run to many thousands of letters, but we would not consider it a word in the sense of an item of English vocabulary.

Other words (mainly technical ones) recorded in the complete Oxford English Dictionary include:

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).

Most of the words which are given as 'the longest word' are merely inventions, and when they occur it is almost always as examples of long words, rather than as genuine examples of use.

According to AskOxford.Com, The web site of the publishers of The Oxford English Dictionary.


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