This smells like BS to me, but supposedly it’s true, and I have to admit, it’s definitely interesting. Have you ever wondered what the longest English word is? You might think it’s…
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Even though that’s the longest word in a major dictionary, it’s far from being the longest English word. That word only has 45 letters, so it’s a lightweight compared to the actual longest English word. As it turns out, I can’t even tell you what the longest word is because it’s too long to type on this page. As a matter of fact, it takes over 3 and a half hours to say.
The guy in the video below gives it a valiant effort, although I didn’t stick around to listen to listen to the whole thing. I put a snippet of the word below, and you can click over to pastebin to see the whole thing. It has a total of 189,819 letters. It is the chemical name of Titin which is a human protein that takes care of the elasticity in muscle. According to Wikipedia (so who knows if this is true), it’s a technical word only and not in the dictionary. It is of course disputed whether or not this is even a real word.
Well, whether this is the longest English word or not doesn’t really matter. Just watching this guy recite a minute or two in this video will make you appreciate your life, and cure your insomnia. If I had to weigh in on this, it’s not a word. I mean, shouldn’t there be a maximum number of characters for a word to be considered a word? Surely 189,819 letters is over that limit. I think if you can’t say it in one breath, it’s not a word. #justsayin
Listen To The Longest English Word
(If you have over 3 hours to waste)
Via: [Oddity Central] [Geekologie] [Ripley’s]
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