<pre>
Q: What is the longest word in the English language?


A:

<pre>
  But then one day I learned a word
  that saved me achin' nose,
  the biggest word you ever 'eard,
  and this is 'ow it goes:
                    - "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from
		    Walt Disney's film ''Mary Poppins''
</pre>

Some odd properties of words are so obvious that they inevitably will
be abused.  No property has been abused more than word length; every
child wants to know what the longest word is.  The temptation to coin a
new record holder has proven irresistable.  Few of these coined words
make their way into dictionaries, but some do, and every few
generations the canonical longest "word" changes.

In ancient Greece, Aristophanes was fond of concocting long words to
amuse his audiences.  His longest comes from the play ''Ecclesiazusae''
and basically means "hash":

<pre>
  lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleiosanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelito
  katakechymenokichlepikossyphopattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopel
  eiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.
</pre>

In Shakespeare's school days he learned the longest Latin word, which
the clown Costard pontificates in ''Love's Labor's Lost'':

<pre>
  honorificabilitudinitatibus.
</pre>

In Sir Walter Scott's youth he learned the longest word and repeated it
to his diary (though he mangled it a bit by replacing the first n with
a p):

<pre>
  floccinaucinihilipilification.
</pre>

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students learned that
the longest word was:

<pre>
  antidisestablishmentarianism.
</pre>

And so on.

Suppose we ignore these coined examples.  Then what is the longest
word?  As technical knowledge accumulates, ever more complicated
experimental apparatus, chemical compounds, medical conditions, etc.
are invented or discovered.  These need to be named, and these names
tend to be quite long.  Words like:

<pre>
  anhydrohydroxyprogesterone,
  dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,
  electroencephalographically,
  ethylenediaminetetraacetate,
  hydroxydesoxycorticosterone,
  octamethylpyrophosphoramide,
</pre>

and

<pre>
  trinitrophenylmethylnitramine
</pre>

come into use.  The longest medical-sounding word in the major
dictionaries is the 45-letter name of a supposed lung disease:

<pre>
  pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
</pre>

However, it turns out that this word is a hoax perpetrated by the
members of the National Puzzlers' League, the country's oldest wordplay
association.  The word is unknown to medical science.  The League
President (Everett M. Smith) coined the word at the 103rd meeting of
the League, held on February 22, 1935 in New York City.  It was picked
up by a newspaper reporter for the Herald Tribune and printed the next
day in the headline of an article on the League meeting.  Frank Scully,
author of a series of puzzle books and later one of the early UFO
enthusiasts, read the newspaper article and repeated the word in
"Bedside Manna; The Third Fun in Bed Book," (Simon and Schuster, 1936,
p. 87).  On the strength of this citation, League members (with a wink
from the editors?) got the word into both the OED Supplement and
Webster's Third.  There it remains even to this day.

Suppose we ignore these technical terms.  Then what is the longest
word?  Dictionaries contain many long words such as:

<pre>
  countercountermeasures
  deinstitutionalization
  intercomprehensibility
  interdenominationalism
  overintellectualization
  postimpressionistically
  semimicrodetermination
  transubstantiationalist.
</pre>

However, in order to save space, dictionaries do not explicitly list
all such words, which are called "closed compounds."  In the
explanatory sections of most dictionaries, the editors explicitly state
that since the meanings of these words can be deduced from their
component parts, the space they would consume can be put to better
use.  So, for example, many verbs can have "re-" added to them to form
other verbs, and many nouns, adjectives and adverbs can likewise be
modified by the application of prefixes and suffixes.  If these
prefixes or suffixes can be added once, why can't they be added again?
"countercountermeasures" is a word; is "countercountercountermeasures"
one too?

And so on.

Suppose we strip off the prefixes and suffixes.  Then what is the
longest word?  The problem now is that it's not easy to say what is a
prefix or a suffix, because most words were formed sometime in history
by compounding shorter words.  For example, in the word "alphabet," is
"alpha" a prefix?

So the only reasonable conclusion is that there is no longest word.
Mathematicians have known for millennia that there is no largest
number.  They have adjusted to the disappointment.  I suppose we can
too.  But if a small child (or newspaper reporter) pleads with you to
please, please, tell what the longest word is, perhaps a 45-letter lung
disease will be good enough for a few generations.
</pre>
