Why This Is The Longest Word In The English Language

Why This Is The Longest Word In The English Language

This jumble of over 1000 unreadable letters is not the product of a kitty dancing on a keyboard. It’s a protein found inside of a virus. And it’s the longest word in the English language. Probably.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the obnoxious blob of sound we’re all taught is the longest word in the world as children, is not a real word. It’s artificial verbiage, designed to be the longest word in the English language, the same way calorically empty Diet Coke is designed to impersonate a real thing. Which prompts NPR’s Robert Krulwich’s probe into the real longest world in English. A mission to find “a word that is not famous for being long, but a word that describes something real”.

Dug up by Sam Kean in his book The Disappearing Spoon, it’s the 1185-letter word you see above, a protein inside of the tobacco mosaic virus, which appeared in 1964. There are longer molecules in existence, like a 1913-letter word describing a protein inside of a tryptophan virus – but they’ve never been printed in their entirety, unlike the winding screed above. Does that rule them out? The rabbit hole goes deeper: [NPR]


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