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I think, languages should by sorted by language families and not simply by alphabet. --ŠJů (talk) 16:05, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
I've removed alleged Konstantynopolitańczykiewiczykówna - "young girl who is an inhabitant of Constantinople", unless someone cites source. This is only an artificial word. Words ending with ...ówna are indeed old-fashioned way of addressing young unmarried women, BUT they are created of family names, not cities. Konstantynopolitańczykówna would be a daughter of Mr. Konstantynopolitańczyk (meaning an inhabitant of Constantinople), but Konstantynopolitańczykiewiczykówna would be a daughter of Konstantynopolitańczykiewiczyk, which is only theoretically possible Polish name, without a meaning. A female inhabitant of Constantinople would be Konstantynopolitanka (probably, since such form is rather not used), so theoretically a very young female inhabitant could be Konstantynopolitaneczka (like Krakowianeczka - of Cracov). Some claim it would be konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka, but it also seems to be artificial word (according to pl.wiktionary it's non existing). Pibwl ←« 14:06, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka should be changed to Konstantynopolitaneczka or removed, as it is grammatically incorrect in polish (pl.wiktionary).151.243.209.22 (talk) 19:41, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
The longest word in the English language is not "your mum". I can't correct it as I have no idea what it is. I could make a place-holder guess, but that wouldn't be maintaining the renowned Wikipedia standard. could someone please address this?
I must admit, I did have a good laugh though. -To all the jokers out there.
156.62.3.21 (talk) 23:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)Mike (i've never done this before, is this what they meant?)
Anyone remotely familiar with Lithuanian morphology would attest that "nebeprisikiškiakopūsteliaudavome" is not the longest form of "kiškiakopūsteliauti", because the suffix for singular dative case of past iterative active participle "-davusiems/-davusioms" is clearly longer than suffix for plural first or second person of past iterative tense "-davome/-davote". Thus the true longest word of Lithuanian language is "nebeprisikiškiakopūsteliaudavusiems" at 35 letters - "for those who were repeatedly unable to pick enough wood-sorrels in the past". 88.222.177.11 (talk) 14:47, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
What's up with septyniasdešimtseptyniuosestraipsniuose? It should be written separately: septyniasdešimt septyniuose straipsniuose. You never write it as one word. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.100.65.24 (talk) 13:58, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
finnish longest word is lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (60 letters) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.77.41.112 (talk) 18:29, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
by that logic the danish, german, estonian, French (made from 2 words), romanian, swedish entries would have to be wiped as they are compound words. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.131.105.133 (talk) 09:36, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
We seem to have adequate criteria in the lead, which aren't being used, and there is a lot of unsourced stuff, some perhaps vandalism/hoax edits which we can't identify as we have no sources. Any reason not to delete them? Dougweller (talk) 07:55, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Isn't that paragraph-long construction a bit of a stretch? As I understand, that word is neither in remotely correct Hungarian, nor does it have any especial meaning. Florestanová (talk) 15:37, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi, sorry for not being proper at editing, I'm not a wikipedia editor, but I have a master's degree in Hungarian and I'm also Hungarian, so I desperetaly need to let you know
legösszetettebbszóhosszúságvilágrekorddöntéskényszerneurózistünetegyüttesmegnyilvánulásfejleszthetőségvizsgálataitokról
is not a Hungarian word.
In Hungarian we have a rule for compound words wich says the longest part in a compound word should be not longer than 6 syllables. When you put together two words, which have their own meanings, if these words are longer than 6 syllables you have to put a "-" between them.
This word is rather a sentence. But at least you should use hyphens between the words. Sorry, but I have to say, some of my fellow Hungarians wanted to be funny, or needed some attention. Hungarian is a very rational language on a certain level (not in everything). What I'm talking about is not only an opinion, or a language sense. It's a grammar rule. So please put this word out of the article, is not true, not scientific and grammatically incorrect. Thanks, Helga from Hungary — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.21.5.33 (talk) 09:34, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
I recall reading once that the longest Japanese word is 12 letters long and means "very short person". Is this correct? Interchangeable|talk to me 23:11, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
The "very short person" seems to be a myth. Short, 背の低い, is a compound adjective in Japanese, so it would be separated from the noun. You could be cutesy and say おチビさん (o-chibi-san), but this is a coined expression, it would immediately elicit laughter, and it isn't 12 letters long. As for the longest Japanese word, this is disputed, and not really well defined. As with English, the official name for the protein titin, which can be rendered in katakana, would be the longest single "word," but that is a verbal formula, and not an actual word. 承る (uketamawaru, meaning "to comply with ~" or "to receive a command") is often cited colloquially as an example of an extremely long base form of a verb, and that could be inflected for formality, tense, and polarity to become much longer, as in 承りませんでした (did not comply), or even, being facetious, 承らなくなかった (didn't exactly *not* comply). As for the longest possible word, however, compound words make that rather unclear. You could have a seemingly infinite string of kanji together if you can think of an appropriate context. We can use a sports tournament (taikai, 大会) as an example. Every year in public schools there are often "combined" or "general" sports tournaments where schools compete in many sports at the same event, which is called a "combined physical education sports tournament" (sougoutaiikutaikai, 総合体育大会). People often add the name of the city or prefecture to that compound, and then the level of education (high school, middle school, etc.), and you could even add the year. In the end, you get something ridiculously long like 平成二十五年度陸前高田市中学校総合体育大会, to which you could then tack on "planning committee" ...計画委員会, and even "head of that committee" ...会長. It's ambiguous whether the result, 平成二十五年度陸前高田市中学校総合体育大会計画委員会会長 which would be rendered in the English alphabet as heiseinijuugonendorikuzentakatashichuugakkousougoutaiikutaikaikeikakuiinkaikaichou, and would mean "head of the planning committee for the 2013 Rikuzentakata City Middle School General Sports Tournament" would constitute a real "word" or not, or really whether the concept of "word length" would really apply to the language at all. Still, I'd be very curious if someone could track down what the longest native Japanese word, excluding proper nouns, coined words, and numbers, would be.Amieni (talk) 19:36, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
Though my knowledge of Turkish is very limited, I have a few bones to pick with the longest word. First, it breaks the rules of vowel harmony (perhaps this should be explained or linked?) and I would expect muvaffakıyatsızlaştırıcılaştırıvaramayabılacaklarımızdanmışsınızcasına. And second, the first k (muvaffaki) falls between a back vowel and a front vowel, so there is no way to determine whether it is pronounced /c/ or /k/. One of the vowels should have a circumflex to indicate the difference. Interchangeable|talk to me 19:44, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
The example for the longest German ordinal appears completely arbitrary to me. In fact, reducing the number by one would make the word longer by seven letters. The text suggests that the ordinal word appears in a Duden database. This is at least misleading, as the Duden itself only claims to have 135000 entries [1]. --Hijackal (talk) 08:57, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
Another kid vandalizing Wikipedia about Minecraft. This needs to stop, now. Varghoo (talk) 18:53, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
I think the whole article has a pseudo-scientific flavour. I find no criteria how to determine which word is the longest in a given language. For example, I find no criteria for when something is a word rather than a phrase. And as many languages that allows for extensive compounding has theoretically unlimited abilities to create longer and longer words, one need some criterion for how widespread a certain word should be in order to be considered a part of a given language. As someone already mentioned, the supposedly longest word in Swedish does hardly even make sense, and would definitely not be uttered by anyone in a normal conversation. I suspect that many of the other candidates are similar in this respect; theoretically possible compounds that have been coined just to demonstrate the word-forming possibilities of a given language, but which hardly would be used by regular language-users. 1700-talet (talk) 21:57, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
I think the Chinese entry is incorrect. The article begins with "The longest word in any given language depends on the word formation rules of each specific language..." but the entry on Chinese seems to be base external ideas of what a word is in Chinese. The article takes one word to equal one written character. However the word 饺子 is one word when spoken though made of two characters, one for each syllable. An additional assumption in the article is that one character in Chinese can be equated to one letter in other languages. Chinese characters might take up the space of one letter, but they are not letters. There is a level of complication within each level. Rather than counting characters or letters, the Chinese count strokes. How many strokes are used to make a character. So the word 大 would be 3 strokes long.
Using strokes to measure the length of the word we get many candidates for the longest word. The longest word I could find is in pinyin biang3. My computer is unable to write it but here's a picture. The longest word my computer can do I believe to be 齉 (nàng) however there may be longer. Rincewind42 (talk) 05:21, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
References
'Technical' means highly specialized. 'Antidisestablishmentarianism' is highly specialized. Pamour (talk) 14:01, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
"The longest technical word in English is the scientific name for the protein titin" is not correct. You can make much longer chemical words with DNA sequences. The tetranucleotide ACGT can be written as adenilylcystidylguanilylthymidine. Thus, the DNA sequence of a long DNA molecule spelled out like this would create a very long English word. The wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs, so the sequence of one its strands, written out in the above manner would be about 8,000,000,000 letters long. I added a few sentences to this effect in Longest word in English. Mention of the protein titin should be removed from the article. --InfoCan (talk) 17:44, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
I just removed the following text: The longest word ever recorded in the Irish Language (Gaeilge) consisted of 47 characters. The word itself is adbheachaighfecaitearmheileadhbhnaertgofoirsede It was recorded for the first time in 1963 and is roughly translated as 'you (plural) are racist bastards for not letting us on the page and acknowledging our language and cultural identity.'
As I said, I'm happy to be shown wrong, but I really don't think so. -- Shimmin Beg (talk) 23:26, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
As far as I know, Vietnamese has plenty of words with more than one syllable - it's just that spaces are inserted between syllables. 1700-talet (talk) 08:15, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Has this been fully protected from our friend the 2-billion syllablist or just partially? Basket Feudalist 16:01, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
The word непротивоконституционствувателствувайте (neprotivokonstitutsionstvuvatelstvuvayte) is grammatically wrong because the negation particle ne (here in the imperative form of the verb) is always written separately from the verb itself. There are no exceptions to this rule. The word is not written in the latest Constitution of 1991. Maybe it was used in any older constitution, but this does not affect the grammatically wrong use. Xakepxakep (talk) 19:42, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
Can I mention [2] Jackiespeel (talk) 18:13, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
There are several problems with the long compound word in Esperanto (komencopaleontologiokonservatoriaĉestriĝontajn). First of all, in Esperanto only roots and suffixes are used in compounding, while suffixes normally appear only at the end of the whole compound word. Thus we should have komenc-paleontologi-kons. Furthermore, the first part komenc(o)- is not normally used in compounds to mean "about to begin to". Beginning an action is usually represented by the prefix ek-, while to me komenc- means rather "in the beginning", "originally".
Another remark, on the sentence "such clusters are not considered good style". Compound words, or words with several affixes, are perfectly normal in Esperanto and indeed form the backbone of adaptibility for the language. Certainly 46-letter words are extremely unusual, but words longer than 12 letters are common. According to the Esperanto Wikipedia, the longest words that actually occur in the Tekstaro corpus are 23 letters long (ŝtatimpostadministradon and interlingvistikŝatantoj). I would very much like to see a source for the 46-letter word. Dumiac (talk) 14:35, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
The now longest word that is still "in use" seems to be „Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung“ (56 letters). The longest word, that is not a compound word is "Unkameradschaftlichkeit". --RokerHRO (talk) 16:06, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
According to http://www.wordcountertool.com, the Greek word is 199 characters long, not 173. OrangeBro (talk) 21:18, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Why is the longest usual word longer than the longest known word? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.5.126.96 (talk) 15:50, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Today I hit upon a YouTube video where the grammatical possibility of contatenating German nouns to longer nouns is introduced and then an incredibly long made up word that takes a full minute to pronounce is presented. I wonder if the video and what it conveys is appropriate for this article in some way or another. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:29, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
This article was littered with random "citation needed" tags - a bunch more were added, making it almost unreadable. I have removed them all (unless I missed any) and put a "ref-improve" tag at the top, but this leads to a question: What about citations?
If we remove everything that's uncited, which is standard wikipedia practice, the article is virtually empty. Is that better? Many of the claims are in non-English languages, making it virtually impossible for monolingual English-language editors to reference them.
Any thoughts? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 11:08, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
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Today user Fönn Dögg re-added a 110-letter word from the University of Leipzig corpus to the Icelandic section. Their source is this page. As anyone—whether they speak Icelandic or not—can see the page lists mostly "words" that are not words. For comparison, a corresponding English page lists nothing that is remotely similar to an English word.
As the capitalized Auðmannastjórnvaldaembættisstjórnmálaverkalýðsverðlausraverðbréfaábyrgðarlausrakvótaræningjaaftaníossaspilling proposed for addition is a (probably made-up) proper name and the source is obviously unreliable for longest-word searches I am in favour of re-undoing Fönn Dögg's edit, as I did in early April. Any objections? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 11:19, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi Zeidra and everybody, our list of longest Esperanto roots is sourced to this search result in the online version of the Akademia Vortaro by the Akademio de Esperanto. (The search is for anything except compounds that is at least 12 letters long.) It seems that we forgot to list the roots demonstrativ-, spiritualism-, and spiritualist-. Moreover, we currently give only nouns ending in -o, but I think it would be more encyclopædic to cite either the forms of the first column ("Elemento") or those of the second column ("Bazformo") throughout instead of giving word forms that are not in the source. Fabrication and falsification are forms of scientific misconduct, which is out of place here. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 14:14, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
There is no material on this article about the longest word in French - perhaps because, as of right now, the main article on the topic is a bunch of baloney, full of words from a source-free self-published book that includes very dubious listings. If anybody speaks French and can improve that article, or the listing in this article, it would be much appreciated. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:16, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
As far as I know, and taking only "reliable" sources into account, the longest word is still "anticonstitutionnellement": [1]
--2.34.77.226 (talk) 14:06, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
References
What is said here about Esperanto ("there are no limits on how long a word can theoretically become") is true for many languages that have compound words. All the Estonian examples can be made longer, one can even pile them all up: põllumajandusministeeriumiuusaastaöövastuvõtuhommikuidülliväsimus. But that doesn't make sense, one would actually never use such words.
"uusaastaöövastuvõtuhommikuidüll" --> more accurate translation would be something like "idyll at the morning after new year's eve reception". Why would one use such a word, ever? Words like "uusaastavastuvõtt" (3-4 words added up) are, however, rather common. From the 4 Estonian examples, only "põllumajandusministeerium" is a real word, the others are made-up crap. Kuulilennuteetunneliluuk is claimed to be a technical term but I've never seen a source (but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it may be just not that easily google-able). Lebatsnok (talk) 22:12, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
Italian numbers up to 1,000 are written as a single word (857 = ottocentocinquantasette); those up to 1 million used to be written with "e" (e = "and") after the thousands , so 985,857 was "novecentoottantacinquemila e ottocentocinquantasette". However this is hardly ever done now, and what's more, when writing cheques, etc. one MUST write them as a single word (together with the corresponding number, for clarity).
As a result in Italian there are many numbers longer than "precipitevolissimevolmente": for example, 985,857 has 49 letters (novecentoottantacinquemilaottocentocinquantasette).
Longest word 2600:1011:B04A:2BFA:0:23:9B75:5801 (talk) 15:24, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
It’s English 2A00:23C8:405:701:9999:FE82:42FD:7DDD (talk) 17:08, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
German is clearly an agglutinative language, you can combine words together, or am I wrong? 185.178.171.238 (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious 2001:56A:74B7:3500:38C9:547B:C2D4:8063 (talk) 23:33, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
The yippi yay dolls 2A00:23EE:11E8:E66:9077:96DB:9D8E:4B0E (talk) 09:04, 16 April 2023 (UTC)