When a man has anything of his own to say, and is really in earnest that it should be understood, he does not usually make cavalry regiments of his sentences, and seek abroad for sesquipedalian words. —Charles Dickens, Household Words, 1858
A sesquipedalian word is one that's either very long or has many syllables (it comes from the Latin phrase sesquipedalia verba, "words a foot and a half long"). The current (albeit disputed) king of Sequipedelia is the full chemical name of the protein titin, which contains a whopping 189,819 letters. Mind-blowing, right? Hah! It's a mere piker compared to the new longest word champ: a 3,609,750-letter behemoth found in The Blah Story, Volume 19, by the writer, director, artist and linguistic provocateur Nigel Tomm. The word, which begins with "'somewhenotoday" and ends (800-plus pages later) with "dingown," refers to "the current day or date between the real and imaginable today." (Pause for inevitable head-scratching.) It forms part of the world's longest sentence, which contains 2,403,109 words and makes up the entirety of The Blah Story Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19.
Apparently Tomm's neological method (or is it madness?) is to string together words where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of another. So "somewhennotoday" comes from "somewhen", "not", and "today" (with the common first and last letters reduced to one character). The word also includes all of the acknowledged sesquipedalian gems, including the following:
-
lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakekhymenokikhlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptokephalliokigklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterýgōn (a fictional dish mentioned in Aristophanes' comedy Assemblywomen; 184 letters).
-
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk (the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve, as imagined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake; 101 letters)
-
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (New Zealand place name; 85 letters)
-
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (a lung disease; 45 letters)
There's no word on whether this Franken-term incudes supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun.