Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is no match for the English dictionary’s longest word.
This column has 530 words. Or some 2600 letters, since counting characters is our focus this week. Take titin, say. Not the Belgian journo who takes Snowy the dog on big adventures but a protein boosting a muscle’s elasticity.
Five letters. Two syllables. Titin may seem one more silhouette on the page, until the word performs its own Tardis trick, elasticising outward to reveal its alter ego of methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanylprolylthreonylphenylalanylthreonylglutaminylprolyletc-etc. That’s 102 letters, and just one slice of titin’s polysyllabic heft of 189,819 letters. Give or take, that’s the Gettysburg Address times 167, a speech in which Abraham Lincoln diverted the course of America’s civil war by the time titin had put on its socks.
E. coli is equally windy. Extended fully, the bacterium brags 1909 letters. Chemists in general have an occupational bug for long words, placing a compound’s every element on show, much like a traveller disgorging their suitcase on the customs counter.
Mary Poppins, of course, provided the longest word most of us know. At 34 letters, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was coined by Robert and Richard Sherman for the 1964 film. Dictionary sleuths have tried to derive the mouthful, sourcing each syllable to define the adjective as “atoning for being teachable via delicate beauty”. Not that meaning matters as much as the delight’s length.
Because length, we learnt last week, scanning The Age’s letters page, is zeitgeist clickbait. Reader Kevin Vidler began the mania, or maybe Waleed Aly deserves that credit. Aly’s column from early October, a temperature check on today’s feverish political mood, included such voluble specimens as acknowledges and disillusioned – though the doozy to catch Vidler’s eye was the 16-letter curmudgeonliness.
“I suspect that I am a sufferer of it!” Vidler wrote. “Can Waleed find a longer word for a future article?”
Aly did in fact, his columns also bearing the 21-gun salute of hyperpoliticatisation. Other oversized suggestions poured into The Age’s inbox. Jane Ross of San Remo took one stretch limo from the garage, citing all 28 letters of antidisestablishmentarianism. Though Michael Spillane went five better with antidisestablishmentarianismistic. Just as Brian Kidd summoned a certain Welsh village, titin’s global twin, where Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is known by locals as Llanfair PG.
To be honest, I’m surprised pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis missed the bus, another fond gasbag at 45 letters. Unpack the kerfuffle and you’ll twig how the term denotes a lung condition, triggered by inhaling volcanic dust. Except it doesn’t. The ailment is a furphy. Or at best an elaboration of a terser malady, coined in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, the president of the National Puzzlers’ League in the name of fun. And elongation.
Notice the year? 1935, plumb centre of the Great Depression, its emotional ebb. Just as 2026 feels like the cusp of data-geddon, the eco-crisis peak, the hyperpoliticised hellstorm, and what are we doing? We’re treasuring long words again, even making them up, such as adding a phony suffix to antidisestablishmentarianism. Or awarding Word Of The Year to Cory Doctorow’s German-like confabulation of enshittification, all 16 letters of it, just like Aly’s curmudgeonliness, which revived the déjà vu last week. Long overdue.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
