The Disappearing Spoon: What's the Longest Word in the English Language?

<p>Shakespeare had a go at at the longest word in the English language with “honorific-abilitude-in-i-tat-i-bus.” If you play the game of stacking suffixes and prefixes together, you can get “antidisestablishmentarianism,” one letter longer for a total of 28 letters. But the longest word by far appeared in 1964 in <em>Chemical Abstracts,</em> a dictionary-like reference for chemists. The word describes a protein in what’s called the tobacco mosaic virus, and it runs 1,185 letters long. Besides being too long to write here, it tells us a lot about the unusual chemistry of carbon.</p> <h2>Credits</h2> <p>Host: <a href="https://samkean.com/" target="_blank" rel= "noopener">Sam Kean</a><br /> Senior Producer: <a href= "https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/mariel-carr">Mariel Carr</a><br /> Producer: <a href= "https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/rigoberto-hernandez">Rigoberto Hernandez</a><br /> Audio Engineer: <a href="https://www.podbrain.org/" target= "_blank" rel="noopener">Jonathan Pfeffer</a></p> <p>“Delamine” by <a href="http://sessions.blue/" target= "_blank" rel="noopener">Blue Dot Sessions</a>.<br /> All other music composed by <a href= "https://www.podbrain.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jonathan Pfeffer</a>.</p>