It is very common to say “I am falling short of words” when you are overwhelmed with emotions. But did you know that some words in the world will never leave you short of anything to say because they consist of a large number of alphabets?
For a very long time, antidisestablishmentarianism, consisting of 28 letters, was considered the longest word in the world and denoted a 19th-century England movement against the disestablishment of the Church. However, the notion of it being the longest word is a linguistic myth. At 28 letters, it is not even close enough to the longest word in the world, which consists of 189,819 letters.
Technical words can grow to enormous lengths but this one certainly takes the cake. The word we are talking about cannot be used in common parlance and is the chemical name of a protein. The interesting trivia about this word is that it will take you roughly three and a half hours to say it aloud at a normal pace, more than the time it takes to watch an Indian movie. So, what is the word?
The longest word in the world reads methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanyl…isoleucine. You will notice that there is an ellipsis here, and that’s because this word, with its 189,819 letters length cannot be written in its entirety here.
It cannot be written in its entirety in most places. This is precisely the reason that this word is not included in any dictionary either. The longest word included in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and it is a lung disease that arises from dust entering the body. Many other abysmally long words in the world are also not used by people colloquially.
A video on YouTube features Dmitry Golubovskiy (the CEO of Esquire Russia, interestingly enough) reciting this word which is the chemical name of Titin.
As some YouTube commenters have pointed out, Golubovskiy begins the 3.5-hour-long video with a respectably clean-shaven look; by the video’s end, however, he’s actually sporting a five o’clock shadow. Damn! That’s persistence!
