The longest word in the English language will take you hours to read

There are many words in the English language - but which one is the longest?

You might recall the lengthy 34-letter-long song titled "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from your childhood, created for the famous 1964 film Mary Poppins.

Or perhaps refer to the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary which is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a whopping 45 letters long and refers to a lung disease resulting from tiny silica particles being inhaled from a volcanic eruption.

Despite those words being a mouthful to pronounce, neither of them is the longest word... in fact, the one that some people classify as the lengthiest takes around 2-3 hours to say.

This word begins as "methionyl…” and ends with “...isoleucine," and it takes so long to say because it has a jaw-dropping 189,819 letters.

'Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl...isoleucine' is the full chemical name of 'titin' which is the largest protein that’s made up of over 34,000 amino acids - which explains the length of the word which pretty much names all of these amino acids.

Don't believe it takes hours to say the word? Well, popular YouTuber MrBeast gave it a go back in 2017 and took around 2 hours to speak the chemical name in its entirety - though others have taken three hours to say it.

However, lexicographers don't technically class this as a word but rather that it is a "verbal formulae" so you won't be able to find this in a dictionary.

Elsewhere, the Guinness World Records have declared the longest word in the world (of any language) has 195 Sanskrit characters (transliterating to 428 letters in the Roman alphabet).

It describes the region near Kanci, Tamil Nadu, India, which appears in a 16th-century work by Tirumalãmbã, Queen of Vijayangara.

H/T IFLScience

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.