Longest word in the English language

This jumble of over one thousand 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 1,913-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]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/0...t=1&f=1007
http://gizmodo.com/5739846/why-this-is-t...h-language

its gonna be hell spelling this

The hell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not a word, it's in http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/S...alidocious.

The shorthand for that word is Titin f3

The hell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not a word, it's in http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/S...alidocious.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the obnoxious blob of sound we're all taught is the longest word in the world as children, is not a real word.

its already in the text ~

There's no such thing as a word ''not being real''. ''Real'' is any word that is given a definition by someone.

All languages are made up of ''fake'' words to begin with.

its already in the text ~

He means "screw that, it is a real word"

There's no such thing as a word ''not being real''. ''Real'' is any word that is given a definition by someone.

All languages are made up of ''fake'' words to begin with.

false, i speak american which comes directly from god and moses.

Antidisestablishmentarianism; longest english word i know of.

Technically speaking, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word.

I say choose any big organic molecule, send a letter to IUPAC and pay them good money and they'll spit out an official name for it that'll be extremely long.

What they did here was simply chaining the name of the aminoacids that compose this protein, it's not like you can't take a bigger protein and chain up all the aminoacids that compose it, it's not a real challenge (or any polymer for that matter).