The World's Longest Words (English & Beyond)

✏️ A word that takes more than three hours to say.
✏️ A job title that wouldn't fit on any business card.
✏️ A lung condition whose name could leave you out of breath.
🌎 Let's look at some of the longest words in the world.

What’s the longest word in English? Or the longest word in German? Is there a ‘longest’ Chinese character? Allow me to answer these questions and more.

I'll also introduce you to bafflingly long words in Swedish, Hungarian and Polish in this world tour of long words.

==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Intro
0:20 The 3-hour word
0:43 Longest words in English
3:29 Longest words in German
5:07 Swedish, Hungarian & Polish words
6:07 Longest Chinese character?
6:46 Back to the 3-hour word
7:04 Goodbye

[arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro]

Next thing, the SMILES code for Titin!








Anyway, here in Portuguese we have as the longest word. Effectively, related to the adjective winds up being longer than the noun because of the adjectival suffix.

[meierzug]

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.

[dunodisko]

Finland has an incredible amount of long words. My favorite example (but probably not the longest one overall) is:
which means: “with its lack of systemization, right?”
A Finnish word acknowledging the incredibly convoluted language. How wonderful.

[josiaboy]

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

[adamalucard]

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.

[averagedoomer]

We’ve got a word “двадцатичетырёхбуквенное» in Russian. It means 24-letter-long, and it is indeed 24-letterxlong.

[ChiefTiff]

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.

[matthewiles]

(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.

[sen.garyhart]

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.

[derbazi]

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)

[RideWithRen]

The longest word in the Standard Korean Dictionary is 청자양인각연당초상감모란문은구대접, pronounced 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.

[stevebiffride]

I'm a bit disappointed 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)

[charlottawesterlund]

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 meaning "protocol of average speed measurement" (literally
I've heard greenlandic have some amazingly long words...
ANyway, I love your videos, just discovered them. Gold for a language nerd like myself.

[jimfus]

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.

[Starwarsfan]

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.

[sum]

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 (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!

[JonSneyers]

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.

[leaf]

"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!

[laurentsalomonoriginals]

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.

[peterlively]

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"