Today is Big Word Day.
We went on a search for the world's longest word. There wasn't a simple answer.
Starting with English, it kind of depends. Wikipedia had the best chart. It listed a 189,819 letter word that is a name of a chemical as the longest English word. But it's not in the dictionary and some people don't consider it a word. If you want to see what the word looks like click here. It looks like it used to have a link to someone saying the word but the link doesn't work anymore. According to this website, it takes about 3 hours to read the word.
The fourth longest word on the chart is probably the one most people know. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is 45 letters long and is the longest word in a major dictionary. It's a name of a lung disease. It's not caused by a virus but still kinda sad to think about considering what's happening now.
This webpage says the following Sanskrit word is the Guinness Book of World Record's longest word with 195 characters
But some people say this is more of a sentence than a word.
The same website also says some languages like German create larger words by just connecting smaller word together like really long compound words.
When people think of long words, they often think about the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the movie Mary Poppins.
I always thought it was real but people would tell me it was just a made up word. But according to Wikipedia the word existed before the movie. So I was right?!?
But I did think how fun it would be to make up your own words. My mom said there are people who do that but there's a science behind it. She said there are linguists who make up whole languages for books, movies and TV shows.
She said the more famous ones are probably Elvish from Lord of the Rings and Klingon for Star Trek. Found out that even my Duolingo app that I'm using to learn Japanese has a course on Klingon!
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