Afrikaans Afrikaans, as it is a
daughter language of the
Dutch language, is capable of forming compounds of potentially limitless length in the same way as in the Dutch language. According to the Total Book of South African Records, the longest word in the language is (136 letters), which means "issuable media conference's announcement at a press release regarding the convener's speech at a secondhand car dealership union's strike meeting". This word, however, is contrived to be long and does not occur in everyday speech or writing.
Arabic Currently, the longest word in
Arabic is the 16-letter-long word . Which means "Did we ask you to let us drink them both?" However, according to some online sources the 20-letter-long word is the longest word in Arabic meaning "Are they forcing you to write both of them?". Regardless, official sources supporting such a stance cannot be found.
Bengali Currently, the longest word in
Bengali is the 33-letter-long আত্মশক্তিকরণেরসময়সীমাবদ্ধতার্থীয়তারপ্রতিবন্ধিতাক্ষরিতাবিশেষজ্ঞান, which translates to "The Boundary of Time for Self-Empowerment and Specialized Knowledge for its Corresponding Characters". Another long word often cited is the 11-letter-long অঘটনঘটনপটীয়সী, which means "one who is very skilled in doing unexpected things" or "skilled at unexpected incidents".
Bulgarian The Bulgarian online etymological dictionary claims that longest word in Bulgarian to be the 39-letter-long (), introduced in the Constitution of Bulgaria of 1947 (
Dimitrov Constitution). The word means "do not perform actions against the constitution" (addressed to more than one person).
Catalan The longest word in
Catalan is considered to be , an adverb meaning "[done in a way that is] against the constitution", however, the scientific word , related to
endocrinology, has been proposed by the
University of Barcelona to be the true longest word.
Croatian The longest known word in
Croatian is , meaning "to those who belong to the throne successor's little wife." The 30-letter word ("lj" is considered as one letter in Croatian) is the
dative case of "the throne successor's little wife" which is the
diminutive of "the throne successor's wife."
Czech Traditionally, the word ("of the least cultivable", 28 letters) is considered as the longest Czech word, but there are some longer artificial words. Most of them are compound adjectives in dative, instrumental or other grammatical case and derived from the iterative or frequentative verbal form or the ability adjective form (like "-able"). • (47;
Instrumental case of the ones least multipliable by a group of ninety-nine on a regular basis) • (Those who are the least multiplable by a group ninety-nine on a regular basis) • (Those who are the most multiplable by a group ninety-nine on a regular basis) • (Those who are more multiplable by a group ninety-nine on a regular basis) • (Those who are multiplable by a group of ninety-nine on a regular basis) • (Alternative of "multiply out by a group of ninety-nine on a regular basis") • (Multiply out by a group of ninety-nine on a regular basis — continuous
grammatical aspect) • (Multiply by ninety-nine on a regular basis – continuous
grammatical aspect) • (Multiply by a group of ninety-nine once) • (Multiply by a group of ninety-nine) • (A group of ninety-nine) • (Inverse of = ninety-nine)
Danish Danish, like many
Germanic languages, is capable of compounding words to create
ad hoc compounds of potentially limitless length. Nevertheless, the constructed word – which means "a period of stabilising the planning of a specialist doctor's practice" – was cited in 1993 by the Danish version of the
Guinness Book of World Records as the longest word in the Danish language at 51 letters long. It is however not possible (using Google) to find a text, which actually uses this word, except for in the context of discussing the longest Danish word.
Dutch Dutch, like many
Germanic languages, is capable of forming compounds of potentially limitless length. The 49-letter word , meaning "preparation activities plan for a children's carnival procession", was cited by the 1996
Guinness Book of World Records as the longest Dutch word. The longest word in the authoritative
Van Dale Dutch dictionary (2009 edition)
in plural form is ; 38 letters long, meaning "multiple personality disorders". The entry in the dictionary however is in the singular, counting 35 letters. The free dictionary, which has been certified by the
Dutch Language Union (the official Dutch language institute) and is included in many open-source applications, contains the following longest words, which are 40 letters long: • , "carriers' liability insurance"; • , "drivers' liability insurance"; • , "conformity assessment procedures" (38 letters) The word often said to be the longest in Dutch – probably because of its funny meaning and alliteration – which has also appeared in print, is ("construction ground for the Hottentot soldiers' tents exhibition"); counting 53 letters.
English The 45-letter word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis| is the longest English word that appears in a major dictionary. Originally coined to become a candidate for the longest word in English, the term eventually developed some independent use in medicine. It is referred to as "P45" by researchers. The 30-letter word
pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism refers to an inherited disorder, named for its similarity to
pseudohypoparathyroidism in presentation, which is in turn named for its similarity to
hypoparathyroidism. This is the longest word that was not contrived with the sole intention of becoming the longest word. wiktionary:floccinaucinihilipilification|, at 29 letters and meaning the act of estimating something as being worth so little as to be practically valueless, or the habit of doing so, is the longest non-technical, coined word in Oxford Dictionaries of the English language. It refers to a 19th-century political movement that opposed the disestablishment of the
Church of England as the
state church of England.
Fijian A man by the name of Levani Mavoa from the village of
Vadravadra on
Gau Island is reported to have the longest
name in
Fiji and possibly the world. His full surname is , which is 160 letters long. His surname translates to "injured while on
Taveuni when the people of Vadravadra went to work at
Ura Estate where he got injured and was later admitted for two months at the
Waiyevo Hospital in the province of
Cakaudrove".
French The longest word,
hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie (36 letters) is the fear (or
phobia) of long words. The word is formed from the Latin word
sesquipedalia (singular
sesquipedalis), which the
Ancient Roman poet
Horace used in
Ars Poetica to describe excessively long words; literally, it means "a foot-and-a-half long". Like the other phobias in the list, can be pluralised by adding the letter
s to the end. The adjective
interdépartemental (18 letters), which also appears in the list, can be made longer by appending the letters
es, which gives its
plural,
grammatically gendered form.
German In German,
whole numbers (smaller than 1 million) can be expressed as single words, which makes (777,777) a 65 letter word. In combination with or, as an inflected noun, , all numbers can be written as one word. A 79 letter word, , was named the longest published word in the German language by the 1972
Guinness Book of World Records, but longer words are possible. The word was the name of a prewar Viennese club for subordinate officials of the headquarters of the electrical division of the company named the , "
Danube steam boat operation company". The longest word that is not created artificially as a longest-word record seems to be at 63 letters. The word means "law delegating beef label monitoring" but as of 2013, it was removed from the books because European Union regulations have changed and that particular law became obsolete, leading to news reports that Germany "had lost its longest word". In December 2016 the 51-letter word ("deferral of the second iteration of the federal presidential run-off election") was elected the Austrian Word of the Year 2016. The jury called it a "descriptive word" which "in terms of its content as well as its length, is a symbol and an ironic form of commentary for the political events of this year, characterized by the very long campaign for the presidential election, the challenges of the voting process, and its reiteration." The
tongue twister gave rise to the
novelty song Barbara's Rhubarb Bar (
Barbaras Rhabarberbar), which became a
viral phenomenon in 2024. Another long word, coming in at 67 letters, is Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung, meaning “the rule on the transfer of jurisdiction in authorizing a land plot transaction.” The longest word in the
Duden is "Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitätsstörung" (ADHD) with 42 letters.
Greek In his comedy
Assemblywomen (c. 392 BC),
Aristophanes coined the 182-letter word (), a fictional food dish consisting of a combination of fish and other meat. The word is cited as the longest ancient Greek word ever written. A modern Greek word of 22 letters is () (gen. (), 25 letters) meaning "electroencephalogram".
Hebrew The longest
Hebrew word is the 19-letter-long (including vowels) (), which means "And when to our encyclopedias..." The Hebrew word (
encyclopedia) is of a European origin. The longest word in Hebrew that doesn't originate from another language is , () which crudely means "And when, to our resentments/ grievances" The 11-letter-long (including vowels) () (
Esther 9:3) is the longest word to appear in the
Hebrew Bible. – Its meaning is "And the satraps". It also does not originate from Hebrew. Other very long Hebrew words include: • () meaning: "And when they were having fun" or "And while in their playfulness".וכשאימפריותיכן
Hindi Hindi has a finite list of compound words which are based on established grammatical rules of the language. The word commonly cited as the longest in Hindi is (), which consists of 24 consonants and 10
vowel diacritics, making up a total of 34 characters. The word literally means "a green railway warning signboard made of copper-iron". Its plural would be (), which has an additional vowel and a diacritic. It is a
neologism and not in common use. However this word is a direct loan word or borrowing from
Sanskrit rather than a Hindi word. A much smaller word borrowed from Sanskrit which is in common use and is also often cited as the longest word is (). It consists of 8 consonants and 5 vowel diacritics, making up a total of 13 characters. The word literally means "confused about what to do", meaning to be bewildered or flabbergasted.
Icelandic Icelandic has the ability to form compounds of arbitrary length by stringing together
genitives (), so no single words of maximal length exist in the language. However, and are sometimes cited as particularly long words; the latter has 64 letters and means "a keychain ring for the outdoor key of road workers shed in a moor called Vaðlaheiði". Analysis of a corpus of contemporary Icelandic texts by Uwe Quasthoff, Sabine Fiedler and Erla Hallsteinsdóttir identified ("of the International Transport Workers' Federation"; 37 letters) and ("of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries' Organization"; 45 letters) as the longest unhyphenated and hyphenated words. The longest word occurring at least twice in the
University of Leipzig isl-is_web_2015 corpus is (110 letters).
Irish The longest non-compound word in Irish is , a 20-letter-long word meaning "photography".
Italian The longest word in Italian is traditionally , which is a 26-letter-long adverb. It is formed by subsequent addition of postfixes to the original root: • : "hasty"; • : "very hasty"; • : "[of someone/something] that acts very hastily", (not grammatically correct); • : "in a way like someone/something that acts very hastily" (not grammatically correct, but nowadays part of the language). The word is never used in every-day language, but in jokes. Nevertheless, it is an official part of Italian language; it was coined in 1677 by poet
Francesco Moneti: The word technically violates Italian grammar rules, the correct form being , which is three letters and one syllable shorter. The poet coined the new word to have 11 syllables in the second verse. Other words can be created with a similar (and grammatically correct) mechanism starting from a longer root, winding up with a longer word. Some examples are: • (cited by
Dante Alighieri in
De vulgari eloquentia), 27 letters, "in a way that is more than magnificent by far" (archaic); • , 27 letters, "in a way that is very difficult to falsify"; • , 27 letters, "in an extremely detailed way"; • , 28 letters, "in a way that strongly violates the constitution". The longest accepted neologism is (30 letters).. Other long words are: • (33 letters – chemical) • (30 letters – 3D geometric figure) • (29 letters – surgery) • (27 letters – medical adverb:
electroencephalographically) • (27 letters – chemical:
DDT)
Láadan Láadan is not agglutinating as there is no mechanism to combine arbitrary words into one without intermediating grammatical mechanisms (such as the ); however, there are a number of affixes that further elucidate the contextual meaning of a word. These are ignored when determining the longest words in the language. The primary reference for vocabulary is the 3rd edition of the official dictionary and grammar. • , 22 letters not counting the space, or 17
phonemes (since for example ée is a
toneme of e, and th is a separate sound from *t or *h separately—the asterisks indicate that neither sound exists in Láadan) – a
set phrase for a
wreath of
grapevine, a common symbol of the language • , 14 letters or 10 phonemes – an invited guest
Latin The longest attested word in
Classical Latin is , which was coined by the obscure poet
Laevius in the 1st century. In
Medieval Latin, the longest known word is , which was first attested in a treatise written by the 8th century Grammarian
Peter of Pisa. One can further increase the length of the words by using their
dative plural form, which would result in the words and respectively; the latter word is quoted by Shakespeare in ''
Love's Labour's Lost''.
Lithuanian The longest Lithuanian word is 40 letters long: • – "in those, of masculine gender, who aren't gathering enough wood sorrel's leaves by themselves anymore." – the plural locative case of past iterative active participle of verb meaning "to pick wood-sorrels' leaves" (leaves of edible forest plant with sour taste, word by word translation "rabbit cabbage"). The word is attributed to software developer / writer Andrius Stašauskas.
Māori The
Māori-language 85-letter place name is the longest place name in English-speaking countries and second longest in the world, according to
Wises New Zealand Guide and
The New Zealand Herald.
Polish Very long Polish words can be created as
adjectives from
numerals and nouns. For example, , 54 letters, is the genitive singular form of an adjective meaning roughly "of nine-hundred and ninety-nine nationalities". Similar words are rather artificial compounds, constructed within allowed grammar rules, but are seldom used in spoken language, although they are not nonsense words. It is possible to make even longer words in this way, for example: (176 letters, meaning "of 999,999,999,999 years old"). One of the longest common words is 31-letter – the dative singular form of "ninety-and-some years old one". Another known long word is (32 letters), "a daughter of a man who lives in Constantinople" and (23 letters), "a 50
groszy coin".
Romanian The longest
Romanian word is , with 44 letters, (meaning "pneumonultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis") but the longest one admitted by the ("Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language", DEX) is , with 25 letters.
Russian Most likely one of the longest published Russian words is a technical term, (), which contains 55 letters. It was used in Russian patent RU2285004C2 (granted and published in 2006). This word is plural adjectival form of the
systematic name of the chemical compound tetrahydropyranylcyclopentyltetrahydropyridopyridine. Another one is (), which contains 35 letters. It is an adjective in the bureaucratic language of the 19th century "meaning a very polite form of addressing clerks, something like Your Excellency, Your Highness, Your Majesty all together" (Guinness World Records 2003). Its
dative singular form, (, with 36 letters) can be an example of excessively official vocabulary of the 19th century. Numeral compounds can be long as well, such as (), which is an adjective containing 46 letters, meaning "1889-micrometers long".
Sanskrit Sanskrit allows
word compounding of arbitrary length. Nouns and verbs can be expressed in a sentence. The longest sentence ever used in Sanskrit literature is (in
Devanagari): : In
IAST transliteration: : from the Varadāmbikā Pariṇaya Campū by
Tirumalāmbā, composed of 195 Sanskrit letters (428 letters in the roman transliteration, dashes excluded), thus making it the
longest word ever to appear in worldwide literature. Each hyphen separates every individual word this word is composed of. The approximate meaning of this word is: :"In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers, was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of vetiver mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar."
Slovak Traditionally, the word ("of the least cultivable", 31 letters) is considered as the longest Slovak word, but there are some longer artificial words. Most of them are compound adjectives in dative, instrumental or other grammatical case and derived from the
iterative or
frequentative verbal form or the ability adjective form (like -able). Artificial words, lexically valid but never used in language: • , 40 letters, "through the least crystallised ones" • , 39 letters • , 34 letters • , 33 letters Artificial words using Slovak towns or places, lexically valid but never used in language: • , 54 letters • , 54 letters Numerals: • , 53 letters, "999499" • , 53 letters, "797797"
Spanish The longest word in Spanish is (inflammation of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, 30 letters). Runners-up are ([proceeding in a manner that is] contrary to the constitution (anticonstitutionally)) and (specialists that do electrical scans on brains (electroencephalographists)), both 23 letters. The word is usually considered the longest word
in general use. This word can be made even longer by the addition of the absolute superlative suffix, rendering (i.e.: "very strongly against the constitution"). Some dictionaries (but not the
RAE dictionary) removed its root word () in 2005, causing comments about it not "being a valid word anymore" and suggesting the use of as a replacement.
Swedish (28 letters) is the longest word in
Svenska Akademiens Ordlista. It means "capital gains taxation", and is usually shortened to (same meaning). However, Swedish grammar makes it possible to create arbitrarily long words. One such word is (94 letters) which means: "[belonging to] The manager of the depot for the supply of uniforms to the personnel of the track cleaners' union of the tramway company".
Toki Pona |42x42px The longest word in
Toki Pona is (15 letters), which was proposed in 2009 as an
April Fools' joke by the language's creator Sonja Lang as a word for any animal of the
Procyonidae family, which includes
raccoons and related species. The word has since entered into common use, and it has become common to define more broadly as any animal from the
Musteloidea superfamily. In 2019 James Flear designed a glyph for in Toki Pona's
Sitelen Pona writing system, which has become a popular icon within the Toki Pona community. As a minimalistic
isolating constructed language, most words in Toki Pona are much shorter, the
median being 4 letters. The longest words featured in the 2014 book
Toki Pona: The Language of Good, Lang's first official Toki Pona publication, are the 7-letter words ("to use, by means of") and ("symbol, picture"). The list of proposed country names in the same book also mentions ("
Papua New Guinea"), which includes a 14-letter
proper adjective.
Vietnamese Vietnamese is an
isolating language, which naturally limits the length of a
morpheme. The longest, at seven letters, is , which means "inclined" or "to lean". This is the longest word that can be written without a space. However, not all words in Vietnamese are single morphemes. Indeed, can be
reduplicated as . The written language abounds with compound words in which each constituent word is delimited by spaces, just like any freestanding word. Moreover, the grammar lacks inflection to mark parts of speech, and prepositions are often optional. Therefore, the boundary between a word and a phrase is poorly defined. Examples of this ambiguity include: • ("racism"), which is composed of the words ("ideology"), ("discriminate"), and ("race") • , which literally describes a dish of grilled chicken sauteed with lemongrass and peppers on rice • , a polite
pronoun composed of five kinship terms Unlike locally coined compound words, compound words in
Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary are less ambiguous, because of the use of
premodifiers (as in English) as opposed to the native postmodifiers. Long Sino-Vietnamese words include ("encyclopedia") and ("hydrodynamics"). Loanwords and
pronunciation respellings from other languages can also result in long words. For example, "consortium" is (12 letters), and "
Indonesia" may be left as-is or spelled (13 counting hyphens). The
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Vietnam systematically respells foreign names, introducing long names into an official Vietnamese lexicon: • ("
Komissarzhevskaya", 15 letters) • ("
Rozhdestvensky", 15 letters) • ("
Metropolitan Opera", 18 letters) Long
initialisms in Vietnamese include: • (, "
Socialist Republic of Vietnam", 8 characters) • (, "
Viet Cong", 10 characters) In modern Vietnamese, compound words can be identified fairly easily within
title cased text: a morpheme that begins with a capital letter followed by one or more morphemes that begin with a lowercase letter. For example, ("socialism") is capitalized as one component within .
Welsh , a railway station on the island of
Anglesey in Wales, is the longest place name in the
Welsh language. At 51 letters in the
Welsh alphabet (the digraphs and are each collated as single letters) the name can be translated as "St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave". However, it was artificially contrived in the 1860s as a publicity stunt, to give the station the longest name of any railway station in the United Kingdom. Long words are comparatively rare in Welsh. Candidates for long words other than proper nouns include the following (the digraph is also treated as a single letter, as is in many instances including in the last word below): • (antidisestablishmentarianism) • (microcomputers) • (anticonstitutionalists) • (semiconductors) • (they tyrannised) • (intercession) ( can be added to form the plural, and the word can be further lengthened slightly by initial mutation: , "my intercessions") == See also ==