What Is the Longest English Word With Only One Vowel

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The longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes an English word. English allows new words to be formed by construction; long words are coined; place names may be considered words; technical terms may be arbitrarily long. Length can be in terms of orthography and number of written letters or phonology and the number of phonemes.

Major dictionaries

The longest word in any major English language dictionary is pneumono�ultra�micro�scopic�silico�volcano�coniosis, a 45-letter word supposed to refer to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of volcanic ash, but research has discovered that this word was originally intended as a hoax. It has since been used in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.^[1]

The Oxford English Dictionary contains pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).

The longest non-technical word is flocci�nauci�nihili�pili�fication at 29 letters. Consisting of a series of Latin words meaning "nothing" and defined as "the act of estimating something as worthless," its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741.^[2] ^[3] ^[4] In recent times its usage has been recorded in the proceedings of the United States Senate by Senator Robert Byrd ^[5], and at the White House by Bill Clinton's press secretary Mike McCurry, albeit sarcastically.^[6]

Anti�dis�establishment�arianism (a nineteenth century movement in England opposed to the separation of church and state) at 28 letters is still in colloquial currency for being one of the longest words in the English language.

The longest word which appears in William Shakespeare's works is the 27-letter honorific�abilitud�initatibus, appearing in Love's Labour's Lost. This is arguably an English word (rather than Latin), but only because it was Shakespeare who used it.

The humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua�a, or reef triggerfish, is Hawaii's official state fish.^[7] At 22 letters (including the okina) it is one of the best known very long one-word names for an animal. It is occasionally quipped that the name is longer than the fish.

Although only fourteen letters long, sesquipedalian deserves a mention. It is derived from a nonce word used by the Roman author Horace, in his work Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). The quote is as follows: "Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba," which means, "He throws aside his paint pots and his words that are a foot and a half long." The Oxford English Dictionary lists sesquipedalianism ("the practice of using words one and a half feet long"), and further derivations can be created as described in the Constructions section below.

Coinages

In his play Ecclesiazousae ("The Assemblywomen"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphio-paraomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonop-tekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon, a word of 183 letters that describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients.
Henry Carey's farce Chrononhotonthologos (1743) holds the opening line: "Aldiborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?"
James Joyce made up nine 100 and one 101-letter words in his novel Finnegans Wake, the most famous of which is Bababadal�gharagh�takammin�arronn�konn�bronn�tonn�erronn�tuonn�thunn�trovarrhoun�awnskawn�toohoo�hoordenen�thurnuk. Appearing on the first page, it allegedly represents the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve. As it appears nowhere else except in this passage, it is generally not accepted as a real word. Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, when the protagonist, was reading Finnegans Wake.
Mark McShane's Untimely Ripped (1963) contains praetertranssubstantiationalistically (37 letters).^[8]
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", the 34-letter title of a song from the movie Mary Poppins, does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun defined in reference to the song title. The song assigns no meaning to it other than to say that it is impressive. The idea and invention of the word is credited to songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman.
The character Big Bird of Sesame Street sings the Latin alphabet, thinking it is a word. He reads abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz aloud as /�bkədɛfgiʤɛkl̩mn̩ɔpkwɝːˈstuːvwɪksɪz/ and breaks into song (ABC-DEF-GHI).

Advertising coinages

In the 1970s, Pepsi used Lip�smackin�thirst�quenchin�acetastin�motivatin�good�buzzin�cool�talkin�high�walkin�fast�livin�ever�givin�cool�fizzin, a 100-letter but several-word term, in some ads.
In 1975, the 71-letter (but several-word) advertising jingle,Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun was first used in a McDonald's Restaurant advertisement to describe the Big Mac sandwich. ^[9]

Constructions

English is a language which permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes and suffixes. This is sometimes referred to as agglutinative construction. This process can create arbitrarily long words: for example, the prefixes pseudo (false, spurious) and anti (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired. A word like anti-aircraft (pertaining to the defense against aircraft) is easily extended to anti-anti-aircraft (pertaining to counteracting the defense against aircraft, a legitimate concept) and can from there be prefixed with an endless stream of "anti-"s, each time creating a new level of counteraction. More familiarly, the addition of numerous "great"s to a relative, e.g. great-great-great-grandfather, can produce words of arbitrary length.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism" is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction, as follows:

establish: to set up, put in place, or institute (originally from the Latin stāre, to stand)
dis-establish: ending the established status of a body, in particular a church, given such status by law, such as the Church of England
disestablish-ment: the separation of church and state (specifically in this context it is the political movement of the 1860s in Britain)
anti-disestablishment: opposition to disestablishment
antidisestablishment-arian: an advocate of opposition to disestablishment
antidisestablishmentarian-ism: the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment

Of course, the process need not stop there: prefixes like neo- and contra- can be added, or -istically can be used in place of -ism.

Technical terms

A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.

Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis is sometimes cited as the longest binomial name�it is a kind of amphipod. However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr Edward Strother (1675-1737)^[10]. The word is composed of the following elements:

Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo[2])
Salino: containing salt (Latin, salīnus)
Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
Ceraceo: "waxy" (Latin, cera)
Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
Cupreo: from Copper
Vitriolic: containing vitriol (in this case Copper sulphate pentahydrate)

John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one sex�millia�quingent�sexagint�illion, coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 10^3(6560+1) = 10¹⁹⁶⁸³. In British usage, it would be 10^6(6560) = 10³⁹³⁶⁰.

Names of chemical compounds can be extremely long if written as one word, which is sometimes done. An example of this is sodium�meta�diamino�para�dioxy�arseno�benzoe�methylene�sulph�oxylate, an arsenic-containing drug. There are also other chemical naming systems, using numbers instead of "meta", "para" etc. as descriptive dividers, breaking up the name, which then no longer can be considered a single long word. One example is a chemical term that has 1,185 letters, it refers to a Tobacco Virus.

The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine, the shortened version of a protein also known as titin, or sometimes connectin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. Its chemical formula is C₁₃₂₉₈₃H₂₁₁₈₆₁N₃₆₁₄₉O₄₀₈₈₃S₆₉₃.^[11]

Diisopropylaminoethylmethylphosphonothyalate is 44- letter word that is supposedly a nerve gas that the United States armed forces have been testing as of 2001. The nerve gas is said to be a hundred times stronger then any nerve gas used in the past. ^{[ citation needed ]}

British science writer Brian J. Ford published the most polysyllabic book title (popularly known, for short, simply as Nonscience) in 1971. It is a satire on those who delude the public with unnecessarily complex lengthy terms.

Place names

There is some debate as to whether a place name is a legitimate word. However, the longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (85 letters) which is a hill in New Zealand.

The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means "Englishmen at Manchaug at the Fishing Place at the Boundary" and is sometimes facetiously translated as "you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle". The lake is known to Americans as Webster Lake. The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are Winchester-on-the-Severn, a town in Maryland, and Washington-on-the-Brazos, a notable place in Texas history.

The station sign at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in North Wales

The 58 character name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the famous name of a town on Anglesey, an island in Wales, Great Britain. This place's name is actually 51 letters long, as certain character groups in Welsh are considered as one letter, for instance ll, ng and ch. It is generally agreed, however, that this invented name, adopted in the mid-19th century, was contrived solely to be the longest name of any town in Britain. The official name of the place is Llanfair�pwllgwyngyll, commonly abbreviated to Llanfairpwll or the somewhat jocular Llanfair PG. The longest station name in the UK, at 68 letters, is also in Wales: Gorsafawddacha'idraigodanheddogleddoll�npenrhynareurdraethceredigion was specifically contrived to "beat" Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

In Ireland, the longest English placename at 22 letters is Muckanaghederdauhaulia (from the Irish language, Muiceanach Idir Dh� Sh�ile, "meaning pig-marsh between two saltwater inlets") in County Galway. If this is disallowed for being derived from Irish, or not a town, the longest at 19 letters is Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow.

It is questionable whether any of the above (with the exception of New�town�mount�kennedy) are properly considered English words, being derived from Māori, Nipmuck, Welsh and Irish words respectively, or being a conjunction of individual English words.

See also: List of short place names

Longest multi-word names

The longest multi-word place name in the world spelled in English is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit, the formal ceremonial name for Bangkok, Thailand.^[12]

Scrabble

The longest technically legal Scrabble word in North American play is ethyl�enediamine�tetra�acetates (28 letters). It is the plural of a word found in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, which was the dictionary of reference in North American Scrabble play for base words of at least 10 letters, and their inflections of at least 10 letters, until June 16, 2003. Naturally, this 15-letter plus word is 'legal' in name only, since it can never be used in a game for the very simple reason that it would not fit on the board. There are many 15-letter words; the highest-scoring word on a Scrabble board is either benzoxycamphors (45) or sesquioxidizing (42). Because sesquioxidizing has the high-scoring Q and Z as its fourth and twelfth letters, it would score 62 � 27 = 1674 if played across an edge of the board with three triple word squares and two double letter squares involved, provided those squares were not already played on; benzoxycamphors would score only 59 � 27 = 1593. Sesquioxidizing is not found in Webster's dictionary, although the roots of the word, sesquioxide and oxidizing, are.^[13]

Words with certain characteristics of notable length

The longest word in the English language containing only one vowel is strengths, while scraunched is the longest monosyllabic word in current usage. Twyndyllyngs is the longest word without any of the common vowel letters a, e, i, o, or u (although y functions as a vowel in this word). Euouae, at six letters long, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels. It is a medieval musical term. However, u was often used interchangeably with v, and the variant "evovae" is occasionally used.

The longest words with no repeated letters are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightables. ^[14]

The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus. The seven-letter addeems (from the archaic verb addeem, meaning to award), alloquy (an archaic or literary word for an address), beefily (in a beefy manner), billowy (like a wave or surge), dikkops (a South African bird) and gimmors (plural of gimmor, an old-fashioned word for a mechanical contrivance) are also close.

The longest word typable with only the left hand (using conventional hand placement on a QWERTY keyboard) is tesseradecades, aftercataracts, or the more common but sometimes hyphenated sweaterdresses. Conversely, using the right hand alone, the longest word that can be typed is johnny-jump-up, or, excluding hyphens, hypolimnion. The longest word typable using only the top row of letters is not typewriter, as is commonly believed: teetertotter is longer, though sometimes hyphenated. The longest words typable by alternating left and right hands are antiskepticism and leucocytozoans respectively. ^[15]

The longest word with the vowels in order is abstemiously, although arseniously and facetiously are close.

Notes

^ See the separate article pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis for details.
^ "Floccinaucinihilipilification" by Michael Quinion World Wide Words;
^ http://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/word/floccinaucinihilipilification "Floccinauci�nihili�pilification" Dr. Goodword Alpha Dictionary]
^ The Guinness Book of Records, in its 1992 and previous editions, declared the "longest real word" in the English language to be floccinaucinihilipilification. More recent editions of the book have acknowledged pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. [1]
^ Discussion between Sen. Moynihan and Sen. Byrd "Mr. President, may I say to the distinguished Senator from New York, I used that word on the Senate floor myself 2 or 3 years ago. I cannot remember just when or what the occasion was, but I used it on that occasion to indicate that whatever it was I was discussing it was something like a mere trifle or nothing really being of moment." Congressional Record June 17, 1991, p. S7887
^ December 6, 1995, White House Press Briefing in discussing Congressional Budget Office estimates and assumptions: "But if you -- as a practical matter of estimating the economy, the difference is not great. There's a little bit of floccinaucinihilipilification going on here
^ http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/bills/hb1982_.htm
^ Some editions of the Guinness Book of Records
^ McDonald's Advertising Themes
^ cited in some editions of the Guinness Book of Records as the longest word in English, see Askoxford.com on the longest English word
^ The Book of Lists claims the longest English word is 305 letters and describes a combination of over 500 amino acids. It does not present the word, however. It considers the 183-letter Aristopheneses coinage to be #2 and the song title from the Mary Poppins film to be #4.
^ Bangkok Post, "Maori claims world's longest place name", 1 September 2006
^ The Scrabble Omnibus, Gyles Brandreth, ISBN 0-00-218081-2
^ http://rinkworks.com/words/oddities.shtml
^ Typewriter Words

Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | Lists of English words | Words

What Is the Longest English Word With Only One Vowel

Source: https://englishgratis.com/1/wikibooks/english/longestwordinenglish.htm

Gilruth Nockill