Next thing, the SMILES code for Titin! Anyway, here in Portuguese we have "pneumonoultramicroscopicossilicovulcanoconiótico" as the longest word. Effectively, related to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis; the adjective winds up being longer than the noun because of the adjectival suffix.
@@RobWords If we reject this very technical word, we have "anticonstitucionalissimamente", which litterally translates as "most anti-constitutionally".
@@RobWords you gave anyone with Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia a heart attack with this video and comment section (Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words)
As a german I have to praise your pronounciation of german words, it's really good, I was surprised. Also very interesting and well made videos, hope we'll get more of them in the future.
I'm German too, and your prononciation of the German words were really good (other than my English). Once, we played 'Galgenmännchen' (I don't know, what it is in English) and I used the word 'Donaudampfschifffahrts...' I forgot the word right after it. But I think, I will use this chemical word the next time...
Because there is a lot of affix to add to the end of the words in Turkish, The longest Turkish word ever said without putting different words together is "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" with 70 letters. (Sorry it's a very complex word that is nearly impossible to translate.)
Just stumbled onto your channel (through the colours video, thanks to RU-vid's recommend-a-bot). Great stuff - educational and entertaining... Maybe something you've dealt with before but what is it with those english compound words such as notwithstanding or inasmuch. Or wherewithal
My favorite long word is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. It's the name of a lake also known as Webster Lake, a lake in the town of Webster, Massachusetts. The word comes from Loup, an Algonquian language, and is roughly translated as "Fishing Place at the Boundaries-Neutral Meeting Grounds" or "lake divided by islands."
I actually have, and still can, write BIANG and I do not understand what you mean that it is impossible to write using normal methods. That it becomes too packed to fit on the line? Any Kanji is made up of different building blocks. Biang contains these parts: Road, Heart, Horse, Thread, Long, Say, Knife/Sword, Moon/Meat, Hole. The rules for writing it is also relatively straight forward. Top to bottom, left to right. The last radical is then written around it as it is part of an exception group. That being said, these rules have changed somewhat in modern simplified chinese, and I only really know how to write it due to Japanese.
The word “PINAKANAKAKAPAGNGITNGITNGITNGITANG-PAGSISINUNGASINUNGALINGAN” is the longest word In Tagalog This compound word comprises fifty-nine (59) letters and twenty-two (22) syllables. Possibly the longest Filipino word, it was reportedly coined by Noel F. Junio.
In French we have "anticonstitutionnellement" . 25 letters. It is widely accepted as the longest word even tough some neologism and technical words are longer. The status of longest word in the french language of "anticonstitutionnellement" is eternal and unsurpassable. To say otherwise is unconstitutional ;-) ...
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis may not be part of my everyday vocabulary in English, my first language, but its equivalent in my second, Japanese, long has been if only because it's much shorter. That word is 塵肺症 (shimpaishō in Japanese), literally "dust lung disorder." The Mandarin equivalent is even shorter: 塵肺 (chénfèi), but don't quote me because I'm not up on Mandarin naming conventions for eliding such key morphemes as "disorder." P.S. Both dictionaries list by a shorter English equivalent, pneumoconiosis. P.P.S. My interest on the term is personal. Decades ago, a paternal uncle died of the disorder. He never smoked, but ran a successful gravel and concrete business in Idaho. Back then, I also lost the same way a maternal cousin, also in construction. I really learned the term over decades breathing Tōkyō air: dust, pollen, soot, "yellow sand" blowing in from the Gobi Desert, particulate matter (PM25) from dirty diesel exhaust, and other irritants.
@@christineperez7562 supercalicalicalivalicalicalicalicaliclaiclaivlaicliaclaivlaiclaiclaivlaivlaivlacoalcoacliclaiclaiclaiclaidfragilisticexpialidocious😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃 is longer.
The german word you mentioned is usually only used by schoolchildren trying to be clever at hangman. But it is true that we can chain words together like madman...and...many are somewhat proud of their neologisms(if that is even the right term in that case)
Crikey, remind me never to challenge a German at hangman. The ability to conjur up a single word for a complex new concept is one of the best things about German. And ultimately, the words aren't that hard to understand because the building blocks are all there to be seen. Thanks for another cracking comment. 👍
@@RobWords Maybe Germans should have introduced some character like e.g. a dash between the parts of their combined words - just for better-read-ability (Nicht-lesbarkeits-problem-überwindung?).
@@michroz In fact, there is a rule that compound words SHOULD BE written with a dash, if they consist of more than three single words. But obviously, it is not used in official language (these law names are really ugly ...)
As a native Chinese I can share a fun fact: The name of the noodle is actually called "biang biang mian"(mian means noodle),so you have to write the character twice! And most cases even Chinese use the alphabet pinyin instead of the actual character.
Is that name "biang biang" pronounced "bang bang," or "bi-ang bi-ang" "bi-yang bi-yang"? I heard someone say "bang bang noodles" but didn't know if that was a correct pronunciation.
Chinese should really be adopting a phonetic alphabet, learning essentially another language for reading and writing has been shown to delay the development of Chinese children. English too should make an effort to be more phonetic, our complicated spellings also delay the development of our children, although not as much as in Chinese.
@@Milamberinx The entire Chinese language would kinda fall apart if an entirely phonetic writing system got adopted. Nearly every single character in the language has at least one homonym which is identical phonetically, so it would be a pain to decipher text. In fact, Korean (which originally used the Chinese writing system) has this very flaw, and they have considered teaching chinese characters again in schools to help with this. Even Japanese doesn't have an entirely phonetic writing system because of Kanji. Although the writing system could definitely use some revisions (like simplifying the characters), you can't treat it like a European language make it entirely phonetic. Plus, each character has its own history kinda and gives a hint to what it means, and this would be lost if a phonetic alphabet was adopted.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (36 letters long) is one of the longest words in the dictionary - and, in an ironic twist, is the name for a fear of long words. Sesquipedalophobia is another term for the phobia.
Working backwards: phobia (fear of), alio/alia (words or speech), ped (foot), sesqui (one and a half), monstro (monstrous), poto(mus) (river), hippo (horse). Fear of 18-inch long words that resemble a monstrous hippopotamus. I'm sure I divided the Greek wrong at some point.
Finland has an incredible amount of long words. My favorite example (but probably not the longest one overall) is: “Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän” which means: “with its lack of systemization, right?” A Finnish word acknowledging the incredibly convoluted language. How wonderful.
'Perhaps even without his/her lack of systemisation' might be slightly more correct as the word indicates a 3rd singular pronoun. This is probably the longest non-technical word, I expect technical words being similar to Latin or Greek origin but with a few extra letters to make the sounds match Finnish pronunciation conventions.
The most famous long Finnish word is probably "Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas" which would be "Aeroplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic officer apprentice". A word for everyday use 😅
In Finnish language, you could do as long compound word as you wish. It is an other matter if it actually mean anything after that, but you can do it. The real question is the longest single word, which I believe is "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän".
I find it incredibly ironic that you said we've probably never used the word antidisestablishmentarianism, but I actually did use it once and I felt like a genius, up to that point, it was my greatest life achievement
Antidisestablishmentarianisticism is longer. lol I have used it in a Discussion about longest word we the ones involved in the discussion had ever heard of
I memorized antidisestablishmentarianism when I was in 6th grade and finally got to legitimately use it in conversation at age 39. I was giddy for about 3 days afterwards. Anyway, another favorite is dodecohexaflexigation which is what you do with a dodecahexaflexigon, which are quite amusing in a pre-internet sort of way.
Thanks to you, I must now look up what a dodecahexaflexigon is and how to make one. Hexaflexagons are super fun, and now I'm learning of a new layer to them, it seems 😊
@@MissingRaptor If you do make one I suggest making 1 long piece using a roll of cash register paper instead of trying to piece together multiple strips, it makes life so much easier. :D
@@sen.garyhart4239 that's brilliant! I'll have to look into getting some 😊 I've already gotten the instructions, but have yet to get around to making one. Thanks for the idea 💡😄
My personal favorite long German word is one originating from a popular tonguebreaker story often used by people looking to train their fast talking abilities. It's "Rhabarberbarbarabarbabarenbartbabierbierbarbärbel". It's a name so it doesn't really count tho. In the story it refers to a woman named Bärbel, who works at a bar, which is known for being the favorite bar of a barber who himself is known for being the favorite barber of a few barbarians which again are known for frequently visiting another bar run by a woman called Barbera who is famous for her rhubarb cake. Here's a video of someone reading this story: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gG62zay3kck.html
The longest word in the Aussie language may be: “Didjabringyagrogalong”. It may be only a puny 21 letters long but it is one of the most commonly spoken words in the country as it is used when greeting guests as they arrive for a barbecue.
The longest word in the Standard Korean Dictionary is 청자양인각연당초상감모란문은구대접, pronounced cheongjayang-in-gakyeondangchosang-gammoranmuneun-gudaejeop. It is a kind of ceramic bowl from the Goryeo dynasty. The word is 17 syllable blocks long, and contains a total of 46 hangul letters.
@@Liggliluff agreed. I'm biased as I live in Korea and can figure out the pronunciation by either the Hangul or McCune Reischauer transliteration. But IPA would be better. Even hangul doesn't give 100% correct pronunciation.
Just so you know, in polish the inflexion -niego is genitive, in this case a nominative word would end with -etni or -atek. Interestingly, many Poles consider "konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka" (a girl from Constantinopole) to be the longest Polish word, but it's not actually correct, as it should be "konstantynopolitaneczka" if it actually followed the rules of diminution. Anyway, I loved your video!
@@RobWords Charlotta Westerlund above mentioned a long Swedish word. Combined with your German word it all makes sense: After reading a Swedish _genomsnittshastighetsmätningsprotokoll_ I decided to invest my money in a German _Donaudampschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft._
In Dutch, like in German and other languages, we make compound words without spaces so word length is in principle unbounded. A nice one, not particularly long but it gets bonus points for also being a palindrome, is "koortsmeetsysteemstrook", which is a (probably hypothetical) strip used as a fever measurement system.
@@Liggliluff yeah, and it's also kind of the same in english, the real difference is just that we don't put spaces in between. As many things, it's one of those things people present as funny as quirky that turns out to be really very mundane.
@@papermonkeyminer8116you can make it a bit longer by making it Arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekeringsmaatschappij. (Labour) disability insurance company.
I'm a bit disappointed llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch didn't get a mention, the (now 2nd) longest place name in the world. It's a Welsh train station and the word essentially is the station, near the church and the red cave etc.... and was essentially named that as a up yours to the English. (I think)
I was going to take the opportunity to show off that I know how to say "Llanfair..." (albeit with a dreadful English accent). I got taught to say it by a woman on BBC Radio Derby once. However, I decided having a RU-vid channel with my face all over it was egotistical enough. Ask me to try it next time you see me.
That and Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu - "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his flute to his loved one".
@@RobWords Learning to say that place name was one of my few accomplishments during lockdown. It's the tiny victories, ya know? Thanks for this channel... great stuff! As an American, I like the American vs. British English content the most and all the etymology of course. I took "advanced etymology" in high school and it was one of the best classes I ever took!
The longest Swedish word I can think of that I actually used almost daily while working at a local prosecutors office a few years ago is "genomsnittshastighetsmätningsprotokoll" meaning "protocol of average speed measurement" (literally averagespeedmeasurementprotocol) I've heard greenlandic have some amazingly long words... ANyway, I love your videos, just discovered them. Gold for a language nerd like myself.
I don't really understand why we pretend there's a distinction between the way German and Swedish (etc.) build up compound nouns and the way English builds up compound nouns. Just because we write it with spaces it's different? It's certainly no different on our tongues.
OK, so after reading a Swedish _genomsnittshastighetsmätningsprotokoll_ I have decided to invest my money in a German _Donaudampschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft._ Yes, that makes perfectly sense.
In Georgian, entire sentences can become an entire word and they can have crazy consonant clusters. And it's not like putting words together. There can be individual words, and when u have a whole sentence it can be entirely different words
The longest I remember ever actually using is "flaggstångsknoppspoleringstrasa" just a flagpole knob polishing cloth for anyone wondering. And yes I learned that word just cuz I had to polish the knob of my flagpole (it was going green) but the longest I've heard of is: Nordvästersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranläggningsmaterielunderhållningsuppföljningssystemdiskussioninläggsförberedelsearbeten! (Northwest Lake Coast Artillery Air Reconnaissance Simulator Facility Equipment Maintenance Follow-up System Discussion Posts Preparatory Works)
@@Milamberinx There is a difference between German and English though, albeit quite small. German still has grammatical cases, and since English has little inflection, it makes more sense to treat German compound nouns as individual words instead of merely as noun bases modified by nominal or adjectival modifiers. And that is because German in the process of compunding actually uses some inflection too, depending on the gender of the modifying element: you either build it like in English, with nothing in between, or you add a genitival interfix ("-s-" or "-(e)n"). These elements are just linking morphemes and have no meaning on their own, so it makes more sense to treat compound words as single words in German. It is even more visible in Icelandic which has retained more inflection than German, so there are, for example, more genitival endings added to the modifying noun, sometimes also involving a change to the stem (specifically vowel umlaut). But still, in every Germanic language, only the modified noun is inflected while the modifier is left intact, no matter if we add a plural suffix or a case suffix, or both.
How about the Greek word: "λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενο κιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγα νοπτερυγών", courtesy of Aristophanes ?
@@skakirask It is from Aristophanes’s comedy “Assemblywomen” (c. 392 BC) and basically is a dish with many ingredients. Have a look at the following: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lopado%C2%ADtemacho%C2%ADselacho%C2%ADgaleo%C2%ADkranio%C2%ADleipsano%C2%ADdrim%C2%ADhypo%C2%ADtrimmato%C2%ADsilphio%C2%ADkarabo%C2%ADmelito%C2%ADkatakechy%C2%ADmeno%C2%ADkichl%C2%ADepi%C2%ADkossypho%C2%ADphatto%C2%ADperister%C2%ADalektryon%C2%ADopte%C2%ADkephallio%C2%ADkigklo%C2%ADpeleio%C2%ADlagoio%C2%ADsiraio%C2%ADbaphe%C2%ADtragano%C2%ADpterygon
Just a quick thing about the writing the Chinese character thing: your comment about stroke order is somewhat accurate, but it glosses over some important stuff. Stroke order originated to make writing characters faster and more efficient in the time when everything was handwritten, but while there are canonical stroke orders for every character (probably) most people don’t learn every specific stroke order unless you need to for school. We generally go by a set of rules that will get you a logical stroke order most of the time and only memorize edge cases. Also, for really large characters like the one shown above, it’s just composed of a bunch of separate parts that all have easy to remember stroke orders, so in all honesty, that one’s pretty easy. Generally, the younger the person you meet, the less likely they are to care about stroke order. There are a few benefits of good stroke order, namely that the proportions of the final character look right (a good example of a character that’s easy to tell if you’ve written it correctly is 必). But in the real world, the most succinct way to sum up how important stroke order is is that there are potentially a few ways to write in a logical stroke order, but there are a lot of ways to write it so wrong you make someone who doesn’t care about stroke order wanna vomit. In case you’re curious, the general rules are, off the top of my head: 1. Left over right 2. Top over bottom 3. Horizontal over vertical 4. Right to left diagonals over left to right 5. Outside over inside 6. No quick description for this one; draw the left side of the box, then the top and right side, then add the stuff in the box, then you close the box at the bottom (ex for 四, you draw the left side, then the top and bottom side, then the two lines in the middle, then the bottom). 7. For symmetrical stuff with like 1 vertical axis, draw that first, and then continue on. 8. Draw character spanning strokes last 9. Draw stuff that sorta spans the bottom left last (ok this one’s hard to describe but for a character like 这, you draw the bit at the top right first, then the bit at the bottom left) 10. Miscellaneous dots go last These rules are basically everything, but they aren’t always the most clear, so occasionally you just have to look it up and try not to get too annoyed when the stroke order is like the exact opposite of what you expected. Like a quick example is 右 and 左, which mean right and left respectively, and the top right portion of both looks exactly the same, so they should be drawn the same, right? Nope! One of them does the horizontal stroke first and one does the diagonal. There is technically a reason for it; the diagonal stroke in the left is very slightly different in calligraphy, so it’s treated as different, but they’re functionally identical in the modern era, so idk why that’s still there. Anyway, that’s enough rambling, if you’re still reading, thanks! Quick accuracy edit: the stroke inconsistency I pointed out is for Kanji (Japanese) only. In China, they use the same for both. This is a general trend; Japanese stroke orders tend to have more exceptions that come from details and tradition of writing, and China’s tend to be more uniform and consistent. Neither is necessarily better; China’s system is much easier to learn, but Japan’s shows you more of the historical development and can lead to interesting insights about the character’s history, like etymology.
When I first started studying Chinese back in the 70s, I was following the stroke order rules and producing chicken scratchings for the first few months until I went to see my martial arts instructor about a problem I was having. He clued me into writing Chinese characters "properly" in a calligraphic style. After that, my handwriting improved remarkably. One of the things I noticed was that you could run strokes into each other in a "correct" order (much as you see in calligraphic examples in Chinese paintings). So, for example, 我, while having 7 strokes, could be written in two strokes of the pen by joining up the smaller ticks with the main strokes. I don't recall any particular exceptions to this. So it worked as a general rule.
I seem to recall that in Albert Speer's memoir "Spandau" that the Allies restricted their German prisoners to a certain number of words per outgoing letter and were somewhat surprised just how long those letters could be.
English-speakers seem to have forgotten how English can form compound words the same as any other Germanic language. Where do they think they got words like "mousemat" or "breakfast"?
@Exgrmbl yes, and a space indicates a separation. "Into" is one word, "in to" is two words and is used in a different way grammatically. What do you think a space means?!
Reminds me of a South Australian joke related to a town name. The smallest post office in Australia is at Orroroo, cos it's only got 2 letters. boom-tish!
"You certainly won't find it in any dictionaries." Funny thing actually, I *did* find that word in a dictionary. It was in the back of a dictionary I got in elementary school. Right on the last page. Thanks for the long forgotten memory!
Reminds me of one of my favorite entries from an old copy of the Guiness Book of World Records... It was the most concise word when translated into English. mamihlapinatapai which means "two people looking at each other both wanting the other to do what they both want done but refuse to do themself"
That is due to the Vietnamese writing convention to write every syllable apart. Vietnamese is very good at making composed words. And it has many two-syllable words that cannot be broken into the meanings of their syllables. Most prominently this is the case with the loanword "cà phê" (coffee).
In French we don't usually create compound words other than with suffixes, prefixes and hyphens. The longuest word in French dictionaries is "anticonstitutionnellement" 25 letters, and for elementary school pupils it's "élastique", because you can always stretch the rubber band.
yep. its mostly because of French and Spanish influence that we don't compound words as much in modern English. although many compound words are still around its nothing like it is with other Germanic languages. Nowadays many English words are derived from French, Spanish, or Italian. I think it's pretty cool tbh. It tells a lot about western Europe's geography and history. Pretty interesting.
lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas, a real job position title from the Finnish language meaning a student mechanic (sub officer rank) for aeroplane jet turbine engines.
I found it cute the line of "smiles has a mile between the first and last letter" and so I hope this comment doesn't leave you feeling beleaguered, but that word has a league between the first two and last three letters, and a league is a bit longer than a mile ;)
You forgot "Supercallifragilisticexptalidocious" 😂 A Dutch, fictional word I invented is "olifantendrollenhokkenschoomakerhulpjesbezemstelenhoudersetjesverkoper" (72 letters)
Well, those German "übernouns" are exactly the same as the name for the protein in the beginning. They're just lists of nouns strung together, and they're theoretically unlimited. English is very much able to do the exact same thing, and the only difference is that it's more conventional in English to put spaces between the words. You can easily have a "science fiction book store chain manager training facility janitors' association", or if spelled in a German style, a "sciencefictionbookstorechainmanagertrainingfacilityjanitorsassociation". So, personally I'm quite unimpressed by the German compound words. One way of creating longer words without compounding is derivation and clitics. Word derivation is taking a word and modifying it with non-word morphemes to create more nuanced meanings. For example in English you have "teach", and adding an "er" makes it a "teacher". It's not a compound word because "er" is not a stand-alone word, so it's a derivation. Finnish has a very elaborate system of derivations and clitics. For example, you can turn "järki" (reason/sense) into "järjestää" (to organize) and that further into "järjestelmä" (system) and that further into "järjestelmällinen" (systematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällinen" (unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyä" (to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttää" (to cause something to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämätön" (incapable of being caused to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyys" (the incapability of being caused to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellä" (with someone's incapability of being caused to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsä" (with his/her/their incapability of being caused to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään" (not even with his/her/their incapability of being caused to become unsystematic) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänkö" (not even with his/her/their incapability of being caused to become unsystematic?) and that further into "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän" (I wonder if it's not even with his/her/their incapability of being caused to become unsystematic?). And all that without adding any other noun or adjective to the root word "järki".
The estonian system kind of works the same, it just usually has shorter and/or simpler words/particles for a start and also has lost a few grammatical operations, these personal or question affixes for example.
That is a common trait of agglutinative languages as opposed to fusional languages like german or english. Fun fact: Klingon is also an agglutinative language.
I was working in the parts department of a Renault dealer in the 1980's where all of the parts had multilingual descriptions on them when it occurred to me one of the reasons the Germans had lost the war, English was almost always the shortest description of anything while German was almost always the longest. By the end of the war the Germans must have spent hundreds of thousands of extra man hours just typing up or writing down spare parts lists for all their equipment!
There is a rule of thumb for "localization" of software user interfaces (translation to other languages). Add at least 20% to the English length. Those bigger buttons, labels and text boxes can wreak havoc with your nice screen layouts.
@@ahseaton8353 it's odd you should mention that, for the last year and a half I've been writing an Android app for CNC machinists! I have no current plans to make it multilingual though. Years ago a machine shop I was working for bought a new toy which came with a French user manual, even though I understand hardly a word of French I had little difficulty understanding it as lots of technical words are similar and the rest I'd become accustomed to from working in the Renault dealer.
I don't know about car parts, but I find English parts names for assemblies and mechanical parts of consumer electronics often undescriptive and unhelpful. I could see an army losing a war over insufficient or wrong supplies.
That's something I'd long noticed with instruction manuals. Of the European languages, English was invariably the shortest. Of course, if it's a more international manual, then Chinese is usually shorter than English and sometimes Japanese is too (but not always).
In Hindi you can conjugate nouns like German, although these words are not used, they are inexplicably part of Hindi. Some examples कंठलंगोट -> Tie -> Throat Underwear चलंतदूरभाषयंत्र -> Cellphone -> Walkable Far Conversation Device Basically you can make any mordern word, mostly technological by just describing them. As far as I remember the actual word for cricket in pure hindi is very long as it basically a general summary of the rules
_"Cellphone -> Walkable Far Conversation Device"_ - that's pretty much like German "telephone", "Fernsprechapparat" ("the apparatus for 'far' talking" - that is, that's the "old style" one, as a cellphone in German is called "ein/der Handy", and it's a noun), or TV set/ telly, "Fernsehapparat" ("the apparatus for 'far' seeing"). PS: _Throat Underwear"_ - that reminds me of that silly "formal merchandise name" for a tie the communist officials back in late '70s were so fond of inventing, at it went something like "ornamental male appendage/ overhang" ("zwis męski ozdobny"). Now, when you see names like that you certainly start to wonder, "are they really so dumb, or just plain stupid"? And no prize for guessing what kind of jokes it inspired... ;-)
The longest German word I know was one that I learned from a book of armoured fighting vehicles of WW1. The British invented the tank, and transported them across France disguised as water tanks. The name stuck. But the Germans called it a schuetzengrabenvernichtungpanzerkraftwagen, meaning trench annihilation assault vehicle. My brother theorised that the reason the Germans lost WW1 was because by the time you say "feuer das antischetzengrabenvernightungpanzerkraftwagenfeldhaubitzer!", you've been overrun. 😅
I'm surprised by the Hungarian example you used in this video. Most of the time when people bring an example of an extremely long word in Hungarian, people use "Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért", which means something on the same lines as “antidosestablishmentarianism". Although this word is 44 letters in length, and there are longer words like the one you used, I belive this one is the only one officially recognized in the Hungarian dictionary. More interestingly, Hungary has comically long place names, like Hódmezővásárhely, Sátoraljaújhely, Reformátuskovácsháza, and Balatonszentgyörgy to name a few.
@@RobWords Thanks, the rough translation of "Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" is something along the lines of "for your (pl.) repeated actions of making something impossible to be unholy". It's pretty much useless, but I heard a pastor use smaller derivative words multiple times in a sermon, and was genuinely impressive.
@@RobWords Actually (not sure if it is still actual after a year but nevermind) your example is a compound of multiple nouns and should be written with a dash. It still counts as one word but I am not sure it qualifies. The example by Daniel K is truly a single word (one root with lots of suffixes and a prefix). There is no technical limit in Hungarian as suffixes may repeat (eg. possessive and plural suffixes: fiai, one's sons, fiaié: one's sons' thing, fiaiéi: one's sons' things, fiaiéié: one's sons' things' etc...)
BTW - you can imagine that concatenating German nouns really makes Scrabble a whole different game if you allow to slacker orthodoxy a bit. My wife and I use the rule that if you can explain a word sufficiently well that the other players accept it, then it is valid. Does wonders to your score if you are lucky :-)
My husband and I do the same in Finnish Scrabble. We also accept words from dialects (many Finnish dialects have distinct words in addition to a different spelling/sound) IF and ONLY IF neither can figure out a Standard Finnish word for said thing. So mainly local traditional foods and other stuff like that, but we do it to remind ourselves that "Standard Finnish" was made up by smushing all the dialects together and calling it a day.
Old comment but I want to add my favorite german scrabble strategy: elongating words. Say someone has laid down "Leiter", I can make it "Schulleiter", points counted for the whole word! Idk if this is standard or not.
A friend of mine asked once what was the longest word in Finnish and I made the argument that there is no limit. In Finnish language you can verbify any noun and that process lengthens the word. Because there's also rules to nounify a verb which lenghten the word one can theoretically string these "functions" ad infinitum. I gave him an example of doing this five times and the problem that rises is that the meaning of the word comes so convoluted that it does not describe anything that exist. So is it a word if it has no meaning?
All Germanic languages (including English, though they seem to have forgotten that) can do this too, as well as putting different words together. So if you can think of a concept, you can make up a word for it.
Oh no you missed out on our longestes word in Austria : Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung / Federal-President-runoff-vote-repeat-postponement
It is also interesting how words become long compound words in some languages. For example there is a schoolteacher in english just as there is a Schullehrer in german. If you specify more then english just gives up and keeps the spaces between the parts. So the elementary school teacher is a Grundschullehrer in german. It is also intersting to see that in languages like german there is usually a process for new compound words, like an introductory period where the word keeps its original parts seperated by a hyphen - often done with new words imported from other languages. Like we adapted the english home office term into german as Home-Office. When people got familiar with the word then the hyphen was dropped and it became Homeoffice. There are distinctions there too. A t-shirt that is orange-red is orangerot in german but a t-shirt with orange and red stripes would be orange-rot in german. And t-shirt is also still T-Shirt in german because you don't combine words with single letters...
6:40 Its a little misleading to say that Biang is so complex that it can't be typed normally. Biang can be typed like any other character. However, nobody types it because it's not supported by any fonts. However a few years ago it was added to Unicode, so if you wanted to you could add it to a font and if your keyboard translator has it on the list you can type it.
Turkish’s longest word is Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremiyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine which has 70 letters. But the longest words in a Turkish dictionary are kuyruksallayangiller, ademimerkeziyetçilik, egzistansiyalizm and elektrosefalografi which are all 20 letters.
Back when my Pop first told me that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest word, I shot back, but wouldn’t it be antidisestablishmentarianists for without them there would be no …
I went to university in the 80 to doa 4 year degree in German and Biology.. it was a fashion then.. The third year was a year in Germany which is included writing a Biology dissertation in German.. The course was very chemistry heavy and I eventually figured out that i was studying the two most extreme forms of compound noun production .. I wondered briefly if i could do my dissertation in one word.. then changed to music and philosophy ..
An interesting way that you can get very long words, especially in aglutanitive languages is just to apply dimunitisation repeatedly, although dimunitisation of the same thing more than three times usually devolves into mockery. The name Jan, Jannie, Jannetjie, Jannekietjie gets you from collegue, to school boy, to mommies' bestest pre-schooler to guy at the bar who is getting too drunk and annoying.
One of my favorite words is "Gastrocnemius," which is the name of the big muscle in your calf. It's a great word for playing Hangman because it uses each vowel (AEIOU) once.
I have used and read "Antidisestablishmentarianism" many times. It is not that unusual. However, the movie Mary Poppins had an even longer word, for a time used in everyday speech: "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." It clocks in at 34 letters. It is in the dictionary and means extraordinarily good, wonderful.
Where have you read and in want context did you use antidisestablishmentarianism? I'm inclined to imagine it used to describe an antidisestablishmentarianist, but the point of view that is against the disestablishment of Arianism (or any generic -ism) seems contextually unlikely to me. Unless you mean read or used in the case of mentioning long word, in which case you should have said pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
The problem with the Chinese "biang" is that it too appears to be made-up, or at least, has a dubious origin. If we're talking about "official" Chinese characters, there's "𪚥", which is apparently a variant form of "讋" meaning "talkative", and "𠔻", whose meaning is apparently uncertain. Both clock in at 64 strokes, and both are obscure/archaic enough to essentially never be used by anyone. The one with the most strokes that I could see someone today actually use is "齉", which has 36 strokes and describes a blocked nose. There are also a bunch of stroke-laden Traditional Chinese characters for various species of fish and/or birds, like "鸝" with 30 strokes, meaning "oriole", or "鱺" with 30 strokes, referring to the Japanese eel; but Simplified Chinese has simplified quite a lot of these to have fewer strokes. In Simplified Chinese, the next-most-complicated character I can think of that I could see someone using is "麟", with 23 strokes, as part of "麒麟", meaning "qilin" (an East Asian mythical beast).
@@VictoriaKimball Pretty much all just memorisation, in much the same way one has to memorise English spelling. Certain patterns of strokes (radicals) crop up often, though, and these can be chunked. In many cases, the radical either indicates the pronunciation of the character or is related to the meaning of the character, so one can often guess what's required. So it's not really as much work as having to memorise 10 random strokes per character. (For computer input, one can just input the pinyin and the computer will give them an option between the possible characters. Or if one knows the stroke order, one can type that in instead. Or one can use Cangjie, which inputs by radicals.)
@@VictoriaKimball There are some rules: most characters have 2 elements: the "radical" which suggests the meaning, and another element (don't know the name) which suggests the pronunciation. In addition, most Chinese words are comprised of 2 characters, which helps to clear up phonetic ambiguity. I'm only at the lower-intermediate stage of studies, but I can assure you that it is 1) very possible and 2) a pain in the ass to memorize the 3,000-odd characters necessary to read a newspaper.
I 'invented'(?) this one at school, in response to everyone already knowing antidisestablishmentarianism - quadrichromolithographically. Same length but (possibly) easier to say! It means, effectively, printed in the four colour method.
That is awesome! I have never heard a sí gle word for "four-color printing" before. I would suggest changing "quadri" to "tetra" since the former is Latin, and the latter is Greek, and most of your word is elements of Greek origin. I usually just say CMYK to talk about tetrachromolithography, as a habit from years of using PhotoShop color modes.
In German, many words one may use on a daily basis are quite long. Krankenversicherungsbescheinigung (health insurance certificate) for instance is something you could need any day of the week.
In Turkish, we have "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine", meaning "as if you (formal) were one of the people who we couldn't make a person which takes away the knowledge of other people". Technically, the longest word could be an arbitrarily large number if we go by the official stance on numbers from the Turkish Language Association (which says that all numbers are one word, no matter how large), but literally everybody writes numbers as seperate words (999 would be dokuz yüz doksan dokuz instead of dokuzyüzdoksandokuz) so I wouldn't count that.
German words are a lot of fun to string together. I made the mistake of playing "train" with one of my students (I'm a German teacher). In the game you try to make the other person end the word so you can win. Ex. The person who puts an "s" on "smiles" loses because you can't add more letters. Anyways. Two full size wall whiteboards later, we were still going :)
Esternocleidomastoideo, the name of the side of the neck muscle is one of the longest words in Spanish (and once u learn it in school you never forget it! Or so my teacher assured us) ;)
I’d like to offer up a nice long word in Dutch that repeats the same syllable eight times (27 letters total) but its meaning does not repeat: Lekkerkerkerkerkerkerkerker: it’s the bay window in the crypt’s church of the town of Lekkerkerk.
awww... no hippotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia ? just for the silly irony of it lol or at least supercallifragilisticexpialidocious and yes i googled that
In Greek the longest word is considered to be "λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγαοπτερύγων" from Aristophanes' comedy Ekklisiazouses (172 letters). It is actually a food receipe and description!
In Dutch you have the very famous: Hottentottententententoonstelling which consists out of 33 letters, but it’s not the longest as the longest is aansprakelijkheidswaardevaststellingsveranderingen which consists out of 50 letters
I love your silly humour! Also the job title idea. I'm a native Hungarian but I've never heard this one. But it could be legit. Although I'm not sure it'd be written as a single word. Hungarian spelling is a nightmare but in general we tend to break such long words into smaller parts and link them with short hyphens. They still count as one word, make no mistake.
@@szabados1980 What do you mean by that? :D Imagine some satanists wanting to defile some religious artifacts, but those have some security systems build in, making it impossible. So the satanist would curse at the object, like "I will take revenge on you for your tendency to be impossible to be defile." - "Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért bosszút fogok állni rajtatok". Happens every day.
In French we have a popular longest word amongst kids: antisticonstituellement. You could also argue that supercallifragilisticexpialodocious is a super long word
Italian also likes to string its numbers out into one long written word, so for example, 802,701 (the year visited by the time traveler in "The Time Machine" would be written out as "ottocentoduemilasettecentuno."
In Denmark, we are also allowed to chain together any number of nouns. In practice, we rarely do more than two or three nouns because of several [obvious] reasons: - It is much easier to understand 'box·specification for elastic bands for cat·toys' than 'cat·toy·elastic·band·box·specification'. - Long words are difficult to read - Long words may not fit at the end of a line, thus making paragraphs look bad. - Because the combinations are endless, the automatic spell checker complains all the time, even if using a huge dictionary of half a million words. Any word processor has a tool to justify right and left margins. It looks good for English, but not for Danish due to the presence of long and medium-long words. A lot of young people disregard the grammar and add illegal spaces between the nouns.
In Persian we don't have many long words. It's quite rare to find a word with more than 10 letters. Maybe due to the fact that we have 32 letters in general and it's easier to make up shorter words. The longest word that has been found in Persian is "خودفروپاشیدهپندارگان" which has 20 letters and means "the people who believe they have been wrecked".
My favourite long German word is "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". It's a tool used to get a clean break in an egg shell, when you eat a cooked egg at breakfast. It's like a long metal stick with a metal bell like shaped thing attached to it. You put it on top of the egg, pull the metal bell up and let it fall down so the shell breaks where it lands and you have a neat opening. XD
This is one of the most German things I have ever heard, a manufactured, mechanical device designed to take a simple, everyday task and make it cleaner and more reliable.
of course you could do places with long names: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu in New Zealand or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (a village in Wales)
The longest word really depends on how you define a word. Most of the words you supplied consist of a whole lot of words jammed together, just like "llanfair p.g." Indonesian has some quite long words that consist of a single polysyllabic root word plus prefixes and suffixes. These are genuine words because each such word expresses a single idea, like "memperseimbangkan," a verb which means to make something "seimbang", balanced.
The longest Dutch word I know is "carnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingscommissievoorzitterschap", being the chair of the committee that prepares the yearly carnaval parade.
Turkish has Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştireveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, which is not that impressive when compared to other languages' longest words.
Um, I'd thought (and Wikipedia seems to confirm) that Estonian, Finnish, Ojibwe, Tagalog, Turkish, and Sanskrit are notable for having long words more or less as a matter of course. Though, perhaps oddly, Ojibwe is the only one of these I've studied. Eskimo-Aleut languages have grammatical cause for long words, too, I think.
If you look at a Finnish text and it's English translation side by side you'll find that the letter count is almost the same but word count favors English more. So for example Ihmisoikeusneuvosto is Human Rights Council. Both have 17 letters but the English one is three words and the Finnish one one.
@@topilinkala1594 Sure. Human languages are more similar than not in terms of overall coding density. Words may grow long, but they do it because they are conveying useful information (or because the orthography is not well matched to the current state of the language, of course, but that's another matter). At the other extreme, Mandarin introduces explicit redundancy (adjacent pairs of morphemes with very similar meanings, repeated verbs, several kinds of mandatory collocations) to compensate for its basic strategy being a bit over-efficient to be reliable in a realistic environment.
Finnish is missing, which shares the compound technique of, for instance, German, but then there is also the agglutination (is it called like this?) of suffices and elements from grammar, which are chained into one word, where other languages need sentences. But in difference to the compound technique, which is usually just an alternative to other ways of expression, agglutination is a central feature to languages such as Finnish or Hungarian. Tottelematomuudessansakin means, e.g., "also in her disobedience" and one could add probably markers of assumption or stressing still. Other than the actual words of different languages, I find their mechanisms and reasons of chaining up words more interesting.
@@pilvikkiitisso5010 Kyllä, olet todennäköisesti oikeassa. -t- sanassa "tottelemattomuus" oli kirjoitusvirhe (mutta tottelematon). "hänen" ja "myös" voivat olla erillisiä, mutta halusin näyttää periaatteen.
You cannot beat agglutinative languages as words are formed by gluing suffixes to the end of the words. And as many as you wish to describe the most peculiar and special things in only one word. So Hungarian, Finnis, Turkish etc. are limitless from this regard.
Most people don't know that Bangkok is a nickname and the real name is the longest city name in the world. The real capital of Thailand is: "Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit".
Yes but when I was there the car number plates just had "krungthep maha nakhon" across the top. I've inserted spaces but in Thai there are spaces only between sentences. It means "Krungthep Great City" and "Krungthep" is actually two words, meaning "City of Angels". Bangkok is just one part of Krungthep.
Yep! I had to learn how to say that as a narrator in a short film called 'Phobia'. Just imagine if you suffered from it; you could not tell anyone that you had it.
@@bazza945 And well you should be fearful... average of 500 people a year 'die' from those huge, lovely, dangerous and 'bum' troubled beasts. Why they poop so vigerously is an interesting tail/tale. Enjoy the rabbit hole. m
That word is funny and cute but also kind of stupid. It's like the name of that one Welsh town where it was intentislly made long for the sake of being long. If you were to make a term for the fear of long words using the standard model of (Greek name of scary thing) + "phobia", it would be something like "megalonymophobia" or "megalogophobia". Still long, but not crazily long. I think it was probably made by up the same jerks who put an /s/ in "lisp" or made "abbreviation" such a long word.
Longest Indonesian word I can drum up is"Kumempertanggungrentengkannyakah?" which means "Did I place collective responsibility on them?" It's broken down into the root word "tanggung renteng" (collective responsibility) and its affixes. "Ku-" means "I [performed verb]". "mem-" means in this case "to create; to cause". "per-" means in this case "to make happen". "-kan" means in this case "to cause to happen". "-nya" means in this case "them". And, finally, "-kah" is a suffix to strengthen a question.
You could make an even longer word by using the full name for Titin replacing the amino acid names with their systematic names. But at that point one could ask what the hell even is a word given that this thing would probably have more interpunction than letters.
One of if not the longest word in Finnish is "lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerikokeliasoppilas" Basically translates to "airplane turbojet engine helper engeneer noncommissioned officer experimental student"
There's a place in South Africa called "Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein". It's in Afrikaans, and the English translation is "the spring where two buffaloes were shot stone-dead with one shot".
I did once see a German Uber noun but never managed to find it again. It meant "The German Association against the practice in the German language of concatenating multiple words into a single word having the same meaning". It'll be great if anyone out there knows it.
@@talastra Thanks for the reply, as a non-German speaker I'll take your word for it! BTW Google translate failed miserably to translate back to English. Thanks again.
The longest word in spanish is: «electroencefalografista». It´s kinda common because in many hospital or clinics there are «electroencefalografistas» working there....
