Talk:Longest words

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Sorting

I think, languages should by sorted by language families and not simply by alphabet. --ŠJů (talk) 16:05, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Polish

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Vandalism

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?)[reply]

Lithuanian

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Finnish

finnish longest word is lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (60 letters) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.77.41.112 (talk) 18:29, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I thought this was vandalism as it wasn't sourced and rolled it back. However, it still doesn't belong here as it doesn't seem to be a real word, see Compound (linguistics) Dougweller (talk) 19:59, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Criteria

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)[reply]

Hungarian

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)[reply]

And there's not even a remote explanation of what it means for a word to "contradict the Hungarian orthography". Inter change able|talk to me 16:39, 1 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Japanese

I recall reading once that the longest Japanese word is 12 letters long and means "very short person". Is this correct? Inter change able|talk to me 23:11, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, what's the Japanese word for ironic. -- Suso (talk) 13:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

皮肉な, and that doesn't answer my question. Inter change able|talk to me 22:46, 5 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Portuguese page lists ニューモノウルトラマイクロスコーピックシリコヴォルケーノコニオシス as the longest word and claims that it means pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiótico, but that can't mean "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" as that's translated just above the Japanese entry as pneumoultramicroscopicossilicovulcanoconiose (note the difference in the last letters). I don't speak a word of Portuguese, but I can guess that the first Portuguese word may be a different noun case of the second.

However, even if we found what it means, that might not change anything. The Portuguese page is rife with "[carece de fontes]" ("citation needed") as much as this page. Inter change able|talk to me 00:35, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've put out requests for help to some native Portuguese speakers, and I'll ask at the Portuguese reference desk. Inter change able|talk to me 19:28, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Turkish

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. Inter change able|talk to me 19:44, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Muvaffak and the suffix iyet are borrowed from Arabic and therefore do not follow vowel harmony. The rest of the suffixes harmonize with the syllable yet. The k is pronounced as a /c/. Lesgles (talk) 04:02, 28 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why, then, is there no circumflex over the a? Inter change able|talk to me 15:35, 28 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's how I understand it: when k comes at the end of the syllable, its palatalization depends on the preceding vowel; when it begins a syllable, it depends on the following vowel. Usually, the vowels are harmonized, so this doesn't matter, but it does matter in Arabic and Persian loanwords, which often violate the rules of vowel harmony. The circumflex is used only when the consonant is palatalized and the following vowel is a back vowel, such as hikâye. The usage is inconsistent, and I think the modern trend is to omit the circumflex altogether. My Turkish grammar only uses it in hâlâ, kâr, and kâh. Lesgles (talk) 23:30, 28 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just when I thought I'd found a language that was almost completely phonetic... (sigh) Inter change able|talk to me 18:16, 29 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

German ordinals

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)[reply]

Vandalism

Another kid vandalizing Wikipedia about Minecraft. This needs to stop, now. Varghoo (talk) 18:53, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Don't bring this up on the article he was vandalizing. Bring it up on his talk page, perhaps, or at the administrator's noticeboard, or at the Help Desk. Inter change able|talk to me 20:05, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No need, I blocked him shortly after he vandalised. Dougweller (talk) 21:40, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pseudo-science?

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)[reply]

Pseudo-science implies that the issue would generally be considered a serious scientific problem in the first place. However, I strongly doubt that laymen (much less experts) would consider this topic "science" (if only because people tend not to consider linguistics a scientific field in the first place; although, depending on the approach and method, it definitely can be scientific, or something analogous to it, just like historical research or ethnology, and as long as it is primarily rooted in empirical data and not theories that bias the interpretation of the data rather than growing out of them: making the data fit your theory rather than the other way round is certainly the hallmark of pseudoscience). No doubt, if the problem "longest word" is not clearly defined, it is unanswerable, but that's true for any problem that is not clearly defined and therefore a trivial observation. However, the problem can easily be defined to make it answerable (by defining "longest", "word" and "$LANGUAGE" for the purpose of this question, effectively limiting the possible answers and the corpus from which they are selected), and thus becomes a meaningful if not necessarily scientifically fruitful problem (though there may be interesting implications or applications after all, I don't want to exclude that). Ultimately, the problem looks to me rather part of what you could call the linguistic counterpart to recreational mathematics – recreational linguistics, so to say. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:29, 27 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese

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)[reply]

I agree that the Chinese entry is inaccurate and misleading.

"In terms of pronunciation, Chinese characters (Mandarin) are strictly monosyllabic. As such, words are limited to a length of five phonemes. In Romanized spelling, no more than six letters are needed for any single Chinese character in standard pronunciation."

First, Chinese languages are not monosyllabic but the Chinese characters are. However, the Chinese characters are 'monosyllabic' in the sense that the pronunciation of one standard chinese character in Mandarin has only one syllable. Moreover, all Chinese languages share this characteristic. Second, there are no credible linguistic evidences that support the theory that "words [in Chinese languages] are limited to a length of five phonemes." Even if "five syllables" are said in place of "five phonemes," it would be wrong because there are words that go beyond five syllables even if you exclude compound words. For example, 蓝宝石华丽雨林 (poecilotheria metallica). And when compound words are included, there would be even more examples like 中国特色社会主义 (socialism with Chinese characteristics), 自由社会主义 (social liberalism), and 阿拉伯民族主义 (Arab nationalism). But then again, compound words are indeed words and so should be included unless proven otherwise; that a compound word is not a word. Third, using strokes to measure the length of a word or a word formation is unheard of. On the other hand, this measurement is often used to group Chinese characters (字), not words （词）. However, this article uses a word as a unit, not Chinese characters. Anything out of topic should not be included in this article, instead on another topic under a different title.

"Chinese characters are made up of a number of distinct pen or brush strokes. The number of strokes in any given word is a constant, and thus counting the number of strokes required for a word could be used as a measure of the word's length. According to Joël Bellassen (1989), the most complex Chinese character is zhé listen (help·info), meaning "verbose" and containing sixty-four strokes; this character fell from use around the 5th century."

According to the above statement, "the number of strokes in any given word is a constant, and thus counting the number of strokes required for a word could be used as a measure of the word's length." Following the definition of this statement to determine the length of a word in Chinese will mean that both simplified and traditional Chinese characters will have to be taken in consideration. Not to mention that no known modern variety of the Chinese language is monosyllabic. If there are any I would love to see a credible source to it. Using Modern Standard Chinese as the example here, the language is not monosyllabic and disyllabic-multi-character words (双字词) make up 70.96% of the most frequently used words in Standard Chinese.^[1] In other words, if we follow this unproven method, not only do we have to account of all the strokes in polysyllabic words, but we also have to show a "word length" in different character shape (词形). Please note that Chinese character shape (词形) is not the same as Chinese character glyph (字形). Character chinese glyph includes xinzixing and jiuzixing (新字形/旧字形), but may also be extended to the classification of Chinese characters sometimes. For example, variant Chinese characters (异体字). In addition, a polysyllabic word in Standard Written Chinese using Chinese characters (汉字) as the writing system often have variant character shape (异形词) as I mentioned before. What this mean is similar to the case of simplified and traditional Chinese characters, that a polysyllabic word can have several representation when it is recorded in Chinese characters. For instance, the disyllabic word biǎndòu not only have the standard form of 扁豆 in PRC, but it also has variants like 萹豆, 稨豆, and 藊豆. Moreover, simplified, traditional Chinese characters, and other variants will also affect a word length if we follow the statement. For instance, tóufǎ can be written both as 头发 or 頭髮. Taking all this into account, a same linguistic word will have different word length in different representations. Therefore, "counting the number of strokes required for a word" should never be used as a measure of the word's length. 173.180.4.141 (talk) 05:07, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Because of all these questions and lack of sourcing, I've removed the entire section. Here it is, if somebody knowledgeable wants to edit/return it: - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:24, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In terms of pronunciation, Chinese characters (Mandarin) are strictly monosyllabic. As such, words are limited to a length of five phonemes. In Romanized spelling, no more than six letters are needed for any single Chinese character in standard pronunciation.^{[citation needed]}

Individual characters are not direct equivalents of words in the English sense, as many Chinese "words" require more than one character to express, one being 葡萄 (pútáo, "grapes").^{[citation needed]}

Chinese characters are made up of a number of distinct pen or brush strokes. The number of strokes in any given word is a constant, and thus counting the number of strokes required for a word could be used as a measure of the word's length. According to Joël Bellassen (1989), the most complex Chinese character is zhé listen^ⓘ, meaning "verbose" and containing sixty-four strokes; this character fell from use around the 5th century.^{[citation needed]}

This discussion is nonsense. Chinese doesn't have words in the manner English does since it doesn't have letters to form words, which is this competition's main criterion. If you counted strokes, you would also need to break down all Latin/Cyrillic letters into strokes. Overall, it is very hard to define what a word in Chinese is. So are syllabaries excluded. Period. --2.245.73.46 (talk) 15:12, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ 《现代汉字常用词表》

antidisestablishmentarianism

'Technical' means highly specialized. 'Antidisestablishmentarianism' is highly specialized. Pamour (talk) 14:01, 1 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Longest technical word

"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)[reply]

Irish

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.'

Firstly, it's been Citation Needed since 2011, without improvement.
Secondly, it's quite rightly CN, as I can't find a single trace of this word that doesn't originate here.
While I'm not an Irish speaker, I do speak Manx Gaelic and I understand how Celtic languages work. This "word" looks Irish, but doesn't contain a single Irish word (well, barring tiny ones) that I can spot. I'm happy to be corrected, but as far as I can tell, it isn't a compound at all, let alone one with the meaning attributed. I can't find any trace of the words claimed ("page", for example, would be "leathanach"). I'd be really surprised if it did exist at all, because I've never before seen an example of this kind of sentence-level compounding in a Celtic language.
Also, that sentence would call for a much longer word - the claimed one is only about ten syllables, barely enough to say féiniúlacht chultúrtha ("cultural identity"), let alone the rest of it.
The text of the English looks very much like a vaguely Wiki-political complaint of some kind. "Letting us on the page" isn't exactly a widespread form of expression.

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)[reply]

Tá tú ceart

Basket _Feudalist 14:43, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vietnamese

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)[reply]

Protection

Has this been fully protected from our friend the 2-billion syllablist or just partially? Basket _Feudalist 16:01, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bulgarian

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)[reply]

German words

Can I mention [2] Jackiespeel (talk) 18:13, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Esperanto

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)[reply]

Although I’d say that any morpheme/lexeme can be used in Esperanto word-formation (even terminal ones; "root" and "suffix" may not be the best terms here), I must agree with Dumiac about "komencopaleontologiokonservatoriaĉestriĝontajn": It makes no sense. Not because it’s too long, but because it’s ill-formed, especially the "komenco-" bit. The use of word middle "o"s serves no purpose (besides, I do take my meals in a manĝĉambro, thanksverymuch), as well as the "jn" ending, unsuitable for a such an example word. I suspect this was excreted by the same fellow editor to peppered other Esperanto-related articles with his own weird ideas and nobody has had to guts to clean it up. While anyone with a normal command of Esperanto could come up with a much better example of a practical long word, that would be OR; Dumiac’s quotes of Tekstaro’s «ŝtatimpostadministradon" and "interlingvistikŝatantoj" should replace this absurd elpugaĵo. Tuvalkin (talk) 05:52, 20 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Longest German words

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)[reply]

Even though the law has changed that doesnt mean the word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz doesn’t exist anymore, even if only in sentences like «We used to have the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, but that was abolished.» — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.159.138.167 (talk) 05:42, 18 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Greek

According to http://www.wordcountertool.com, the Greek word is 199 characters long, not 173. OrangeBro (talk) 21:18, 14 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The longest usual word in French is intergouvernementalisations (27 letters), plural form of intergouvernementalisation (26 letters) [14] but the longest known word is "anticonstitutionnellement" (25 letters).

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)[reply]

The term "intergouvernementalisations" is a non-attested invented neologism (which sounds extremely strange, even in its meaning), not found in common standard French dictionaries. In addition, writing it with the plural is complete non-sense if it means the generic process of instrumenting a decision or regulation across multiple governments: each instance of such process would be very specific and they are not countable, so this can only be an uncountable plural, written with the singular form (the same rule applies to similar terms in English).

The only possible French word with this morphemes is the adjective intergouvernemental (intergovernmental in English), and its derivations: masculine plural intergouvernementaux, feminine singular intergouvernementale, feminine plural intergouvernementales, the last one counting for just 21 letters. But even if this adjective is well-formed, like in the commonly found expression in agences gouvernementales (governmental agencies in English), it is still a neologism (with obvious meaning, but actually not used as such cooperation between multiple governments is rarely qualified with such long term, except in very pedantic language; simpler expressions using multiple words are just clearer for auditors and readers; if these governments are from different countries, we just say internation[-al(e)(s)/-aux], like in English).

So the longest word in French attested in well-known French dictionaries (from Larousse, Robert, Littré, the Académie française) is still the adverb "anticonstitutionnellement" (25 letters), occasionally found in various articles and papers on written medias (but rarely pronounced, unlike the adjective "anticonstitutionnel(le)(s)" which is quite common in oral speech, and even more in audio medias).

And the shortest French words are a, à, y (1 letter, very frequent and well-known), if we also exclude the contracted words that require a final apostrophe (c’, d’, j’, l’, m’, n’, s’, t’, plus the meaningless euphonic-only particle z’ used to link specific pairs of words, or sometimes used as an informal/vulgar contraction for the pronoun ils or elles) where the final apostrophe can only occur before another word and must not be separated from it by any space. Many spell-checking tools treat these 1-letter morphemes with a final apostrophe specially, all other occurrences in French of apostrophes between two letters do not break the word: e.g. aujourd’hui is a single standard word lexicalised in modern French, coming from the agglutination of 4 words in an old informal expression au jour d’hui, where the last one hui comes from Latin meaning the same thing as the expression, the term hui is never used alone in French; but now we hear the very stupid 4-word expression au jour d’aujourd'hui, used abusively in informal pedantic speech, instead of the correct à ce jour, just like it was in the old informal expression au jour d’hui (meaning to the day of today in English which would be stupidly formed in a similar way instead of just the agglutinated word today or the correct expression at/on/to this day). verdy_p (talk) 19:25, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

German YouTube Video

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)[reply]

Citations?

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)[reply]

I strongly suspect that examples in agglutinative languages are created by wikipedians themselves, since they are easy to create; I can easily make many of them even longer.

I added "cn" tags so that when I review the article next month, I will delete all unreferenced. Today's wikipedia is much more reliable than it was 7 years ago, therefore IMO it is better not to have unref'd texts at all.

As for "almost unreadable", this article is not continuous prose, where tags do break the flow. Here we have just a bunch of disjoint statements in numerous mini-sections, so readability is not hurt. The article is very long, with lots of sections, nobody will remember the tag at the top.

People ignored tags placed 6 years ago meaning nobody really cares about this bunch of trivia. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:21, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

While in general an over-arching tag is the way to go (If an article, or a section within an article, is under-referenced, then consider adding an Unreferenced, Refimprove, or Unreferenced section tag to the article or section concerned -- these tags allow you to indicate more systemic problems to the page as it says at Wikipedia:Citation needed) - if you're using them as sort of place-holders, then OK. This page certainly needs work in the complicated area of sourcing.

I've had this on my watchlist for years without doing anything about the situation, so I shouldn't be getting huffy about it! - DavidWBrooks (talk) 17:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Icelandic 110-letter word/University of Leipzig corpus

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)[reply]

I'm not objecting to removing it, as such, but I'd like to observe and reiterate that in Icelandic:

compounds of arbitrary length can be formed.
The longer these get, the less frequently they will appear in text corpora (other than perhaps as demonstrations of the previous item).
Any "cut-off" value for frequency of use, where a word is considered "naturally occuring" if it occurs at least as frequently, and "made-up" otherwise, is going to be arbitrary.

Furthermore, I think that:

we should not present "longest" words (without qualifiers) as fact when they aren't.
If a word is the longest word appearing in a specific text corpus, we can note that fact.
Text corpora published by linguistic researchers at well-known and well-respected universities qualify as valid sources.

I agree that "auðmannastjórnvaldaembættisstjórnmálaverkalýðsverðlausraverðbréfaábyrgðarlausrakvótaræningjaaftaníossaspilling" is a silly word. But I don't think e.g. "vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúraútidyralyklakippuhringur" is any less silly; nobody's ever going to use either word, in earnest. The examples from the Íslensk tíðniorðabók are more natural --- but "natural" is a subjective judgement on my part. (It has, of course, famously been observed in linguistics that speaking a language doesn't mean you know anything about it.)

So if my addition were to be removed -- which I think would be justifiable --, then in light of the above the entire section on Icelandic would need to be rewritten to indicate that there is no single "longest word" in Icelandic, and all the other examples of particularly long words purged as well. (The same probably goes for several other languages on this page, at the very least any language capable of forming closed-form compounds.)

And that strikes me as undesirable. YMMV, of course. Fönn Dögg (talk) 11:02, 9 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see a significant difference between the examples you cite: The statement about vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúraútidyralyklakippuhringur has an independent source (see also Wikipedia:Verifiability) whereas the one about Auðmannastjórnvaldaembættisstjórnmálaverkalýðsverðlausraverðbréfaábyrgðarlausrakvótaræningjaaftaníossaspilling is original research which is not allowed on en.WP. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 17:13, 9 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Longest Esperanto roots

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)[reply]

French - help needed

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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

References

^ https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/actu-des-mots/2017/12/08/37002-20171208ARTFIG00140-non-l-academie-n-a-pas-ajoute-un-nouveau-mot-le-plus-long-dans-son-dictionnaire.php

Estonian compound words

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)[reply]

Italian numbers!

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

Longest word 2600:1011:B04A:2BFA:0:23:9B75:5801 (talk) 15:24, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English

It’s English 2A00:23C8:405:701:9999:FE82:42FD:7DDD (talk) 17:08, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

German?

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)[reply]

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious 2001:56A:74B7:3500:38C9:547B:C2D4:8063 (talk) 23:33, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

English

The yippi yay dolls 2A00:23EE:11E8:E66:9077:96DB:9D8E:4B0E (talk) 09:04, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Korean

찰리 브라운 컬러 선택 시 네이버 블로그 이미지 나 자신을 위한 다양한 종류의 음식을 먹고 있는 것이 좋다 나쁘다 옳다 하니 많은 관심 부탁드립니다 여러분들의 소중한 한 가지 않고 있다 이 모든 것을 추천합니다. 딘 타이 시리즈 중 가장 중요한 역할을 하고 있는 것이다 이 모든 것을 추천합니다. 2.29.65.194 (talk) 20:18, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Greenlandic

Should we add "aliikkusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli" from Polysynthetic language#Meaning? 67.209.130.158 (talk) 20:27, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[1] 《现代汉字常用词表》

[2] ttps://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/actu-des-mots/2017/12/08/37002-20171208ARTFIG00140-non-l-academie-n-a-pas-ajoute-un-nouveau-mot-le-plus-long-dans-son-dictionnaire.php

[1]

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