If you think your teachers use long, complicated words, try this on them.Consisting of 28 letters and 12 syllables, antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest English word that isn’t a technical term or a word that was specifically coined to be freakishly long.
The bad news is, you’d struggle to use this cool word in conversation – it has a rather specific definition. Basically, it refers to ‘a political position that opposes the withdrawal of state recognition of an established church’, and originated in 19th-century Britain. Still, most people have never heard the word before, so they wouldn’t really be able to correct you if you threw it into conversation.
But if you’re prepared to count technical terms and words that were designed to be really long, then ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ would be trumped by ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ (29 letters, meaning worthlessness) and the 45-letter ‘pneumoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ (a medical term describing silica accumulation in the lungs due to inhalation of volcanic ash). Talk about a mouthful!
