The longest word in literature

May 1, 2019 • 2:30 pm

Here it is:

λοπαδο­τεμαχο­σελαχο­γαλεο­κρανιο­λειψανο­δριμυ­ποτριμματο­σιλφιο­καραβο­μελιτο­κατακεχυμενο­κιχλε­πικοσσυφο­φαττο­περιστερα­λεκτρυο­νοπτο­κεφαλλιο­κιγκλο­πελειο­λαγῳο­σιραιο­βαφητραγανοπτερύγων

This is an ancient Greek word listed in Wikipedia (see also Wiktionary), which says “The Greek word has 172 letters and 78 syllables. The transliteration has 182 Latin characters. It is the longest word ever to appear in literature according to Guinness World Records (1990).” The transliteration into English is this:

Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmato
silphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralekt
ryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon

Where does it come from and what does it mean? It’s a made-up word, and from Aristophanes, of course. Wiktionary breaks it down:

Coined by Aristophanes in Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι (Assemblywomen).
From λοπᾰ́ς (lopás, “dish, meal”) +‎ τέμᾰχος (témakhos, “fish slice”) +‎ σέλαχος (sélakhos, “shark, ray”) +‎ γᾰλεός (galeós, “dogfish, small shark”) +‎ κρᾱνῐ́ον (krāníon, “head”) +‎ λείψᾰνον (leípsanon, “remnant”) +‎
δρῑμῠ́ς(drīmús, “sharp, pungent”) +‎ ῠ̔πότριμμᾰ (hupótrimma, “generally sharp-tasting dish of several ingredients grated and pounded together”) +‎ σίλφιον (sílphion, “laserwort”) +‎ κᾱ́ρᾰβος (kā́rabos, “crab, beetle, or crayfish”) +‎ μέλῐ (méli, “honey”) +‎ κᾰτᾰχέω (katakhéō, “I pour over”) +‎ κῐ́χλη(kíkhlē, “wrasse, thrush”) +‎ ἐπῐ́ (epí, “upon, on top of”) +‎ κόσσῠφος (kóssuphos, “a kind of sea-fish or blackbird”) +‎ φάττᾰ (phátta, “wood pigeon”) +‎ περῐστερά (peristerá, “domestic pigeon”) +‎ ᾰ̓λεκτρυών (alektruṓn, “chicken”) +‎ ὀπτός (optós, “roasted, baked”) +‎ κεφᾰ́λῐον (kephálion, “diminutive of “head””) +‎ κίγκλος (kínklos, “dabchick”) +‎ πέλειᾰ (péleia, “pigeon”) +‎ λᾰγῷος (lagôios, “of the hare”) +‎ σῐ́ραιον (síraion, “new wine boiled down”) +‎ βᾰφή (baphḗ, “dipping”) +‎ τρᾰγᾰνός (traganós, “crunchy”) +‎ πτέρυξ (ptérux, “wing, fin”)

And a sort-of translation:

The translation given by Benjamin Bickley Rogers in 1902 is plattero-filleto-mulleto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-honeyo-pouredonthe-topothe-ouzelo-throstleo-cushato-culvero-cutleto-roastingo-marowo-dippero-leveret-syrupu-gibleto-wings.

h/t: Nilou

 

85 thoughts on “The longest word in literature”

  1. Not quite as long; but, I love the fall in “Finnegan’s Wake:” “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” 👍🏼

    2. Beats antidisestablishmentarianism by one letter. Though the origins of flocci-etc are suspect, I submit, because they comprise a list of words; it could have been made arbitrarily shorter by omitting the ‘pili’ or longer by adding a ‘assis’ before the ‘action’ component -fication. (See the Wikipedia page). In that way it resembles Aristophanes’ confection.

      Whereas antidisestablishmentarianism is built up in stages, from ‘establishment’, each one of them with a distinct meaning (and hence, much easier to remember).

      cr

  5. Sala-gadoola-menchicka-boo-la bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

    plattero-filleto-mulleto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-honeyo-pouredonthe-topothe-ouzelo-throstleo-cushato-culvero-cutleto-roastingo-marowo-dippero-leveret-syrupu-gibleto-wings.

    Bibbidi boppidy boo.

  6. Given that it’s about food, I’d have thought it came from the Deipnosophists by Athenaeus of Naucratis (Greco-Roman Egypt), a multivolume 3rd century AD work about a bunch of Greek dudes, gourmands in the old (correct sense, not a synonym for ‘gourmet’ as it’s used now), who get together for a series of dinners with lots of wine, and discuss everything under the sun, including food, natural history of the day, philosophy, etc., and they rag on everybody, past, present, and maybe imaginary.

    Here they are discussing eels “And the people who feed eels say that they feed by night, but that during the day they remain motionless in the mud; and they live about eight years at most. But in other places, Aristotle tells us again, that they are produced without either their progenitors laying eggs or bringing forth living offspring, and also that they are not generated by any copulation, but that they are propagated by the putrefaction which takes place in the mud and slime–as it is said of those things which are called the entrails of the earth.”

    It is delightful and crazy and one learns a heck of a lot. It’s a desert island book for me (Loeb Classics only) even one or two volumes.

    1. “entrails of the earth.” I must remember that phrase, whatever the heck they mean.

      They’re discussing eels because they love to eat them. Helen is even compared to an eel, but I’ve not yet figured out why — some in-joke or compliment.

      3. In some ancient protoscience the earth was held to be a sort of animal. “Bowels of the earth” comes from that, as does “mother lode” – the latter referring to how it used to be thought by some that the Earth grew minerals the way an organism grows limbs or organs.

    2. They probably just wanted to list all the stuff they were eating and didn’t want to waste space so ran it together. Ancient languages are notorious for that.

      1. Thatsaverygoodpointdianathusitsnotreallyawordthoughgermansmaydisagreewithme

        1. But Germans do that stuff all the time. Greeks, not so much except to save space because papyrus/rock is expensive.

  7. And here I thought, “What a good boy am I” by knowing how to spell ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’.

  10. I won a spelling competition when I was twelve, up against all the kids at school, from 11 through to 18.

    The only word I got wrong was ‘assassin’ and it’s been seared into my brain ever since.

    They don’t look it to a lot of people but by far the hardest to spell are words like assassin or embarrassing or harassment that seem perfectly straightforward but are pure evil when you’re trying to remember them. There are also the rather boring words like parallel, that seem normal but are spelled in such patently absurd ways that they seem like the equivalent of trick questions when they come up.

    By contrast, the big, daunting-looking ones like onomatopoeia or cuneiform are unique enough that you remember how they’re spelled pretty easily.

    Anyway the contest was at easter, I got two chocolate eggs for a prize and it was all done on stage, in front of the whole school. While the headmistress was rambling on post-win I absentmindedly cracked open one of the eggs and it exploded all over the stage. The shards went everywhere, it looked like a bomb had gone off. The entire school laughed for about a minute and a half. I just sat there smiling, trying to look innocent.

    1. I’m not very good at spelling and grammar, and so I can never spell ‘decision’ correctly without spell check to help me. I just can’t get it into my brain.

      1. I suck at English spelling and English is my first language. That’s because English is hard to spell in.

        2. My spelling and grammar have both dipped in quality over the last ten years, and gone into a nosedive over the last two or three.

          Even so it annoys me that one of the few tangible talents I ever had in an academic sense has now been rendered moot by spellchecks and grammar-checking algorithms. Also people don’t really seem to value spelling or grammar as much any more, what with texts and even e-mails encouraging a kind of shorthand.

          1. I’ve always been terrible at punctuation as well and I blame that on the weird rules of English as well.

          2. Agreed.

            And long before that my moderate ability at mental arithmetic was devalued by pocket calculators. (Though I still mentally deride shop assistants who have to use a calculator to add $3 and $5.30 and give change from $10…)

            cr

      2. The way I learn to spell words that I have difficulty with is to read them back to myself in a kind of exaggerated phonetic way making sure to pronounce each letter and always using the hard version of a letter that can be pronounced hard or soft. So for “necessary” I will say to myself “neck-e-se-sary”. I find it a lot easier to remember that than actual spellings.

        Sometimes I find it easier to remember words in pairs. So I’ll say to myself “se-par-rate and des-per-rate for “separate” and “desperate”.

        1. Thanks, that is good advice.

          btw, I always spell separate wrong too 🙂

    5. “the hardest to spell are words like assassin or embarrassing or harassment”

      Absolutely agree. It’s remembering which letters are doubled up and which aren’t, that makes it so tricky, and pronunciation is rarely any help.

      cr

      1. You just remember the “ass”. You are embarrassed because your “ass” is bare. haha

        1. Nice mnemonic. (Did I spel that rite?)
          🙂

          I long ago gave up worrying about my embarrassing bare ass, on the grounds that 99% of people are too preoccupied with their own affairs to even notice. (Not that I’ve ever had to walk up the beach bare-assed, but if I did…)

          cr

  12. That is a strange thing for Aristophanes to be caused to say! I wonder what he , I mean the Universe, could have ‘meant’ in belching that forth? Nothing! Just a universal case of heartburn, I guess, for it surely had nothing to do with ‘comedy’, a ‘thing’ that Mr. A. can proudly take ‘Responsibility’ for helping to ‘invent’! But them Democritus was right, it’s all only one “atomos” bouncing off another! Right, Hard Scientific Determinists?

  14. Of course if you allow totally boring things, you can easily make a word longer than any specified length. Furthermore it can have a perfectly clear and easily determined meaning:
    For length > 100, just repeat the four letters ‘anti’ a total of 24 times, then follow it by ‘racism’. That means the same as ‘antiantiracism’, and really the same as ‘racism’ itself. For the opposite meaning, repeat enough times, but an odd number of times. Fortunately we can negate without an added word–not so easy with other logical connectives.
    The word in the original here is not much less boring, except for the historical connection, nor less trivial to invent.

    1. I disagree with you and all the other commenters who dismiss this as piffle; please see my comment below. This is what I mean about us being trained simply to do surface reading. This is the opposite of “totally boring things”. So much is missed with such readings.

      1. I intended my “totally boring thing” to refer only to my own 102-letter word (or 4x+6-letter word for any choice of natural number x). So I’m not sure what your “this” is, in “this as piffle”.

        Some respondents here just take a sentence and remove the spaces between words to create their non-word. But I think my example, and my buddy Aristophanes’ one, are real words in any reasonable formal sense.

        To further justify my boring case as a real word, it is clearly a language rule that if ‘xyz’ is a valid word which refers to a person’s possible attitude/’philosophy’/religious belief, then so is ‘antixyz’, and it is another word of that kind, and so which again can be prefixed with ‘anti’.

        Rant:
        And for anybody who objects to redundancy in that you cannot coin new words which have exactly the same meaning as a perfectly good old one–after all, why ‘antiantiracism’ instead of just ‘racism’–, such a person should revert to using the old word ‘problem’ instead of parroting the stupidity of using ‘issue’, which simply screws up the language’s precision once again, by introducing an additional meaning to the word ‘issue’, which had a pretty clear single unambiguous meaning before. But we must avoid the negativity of the word ‘problem’, mustn’t we?
        And also revert to ‘many’ instead of ‘multiple’–the latter really doesn’t make you sound more precise and mathematical, not any more anyway!
        But I’m just an old fusspot! You can’t stop the language tides.

        1. Forgot to add: Yes, you young whippersnappers have multiple isssues with your language fetishes, don’t you? oooppss!

    2. Primed by of some of the other comments I did take your first sentence as a dismissal of Aristophanes’ word having any substance; and the thought of repeating ‘anti’ 24 times followed by ‘racism’ or any word, then 23 times for the opposite meaning made my synapses freeze,even though I know what you’re referring to. But that won’t yield the rich and complex associative meaning that I was referring to re Aristophanes’ word. One thing I wonder –I can’t find the logical connector you refer to.. Are you equating logical connectors with logical operators? If so, how. Logical operator makes sense in this context, logical connector not, not even not not or not not not, and I’m baffled.

      I want to think some more about what you’re saying, because it seems to go to the place where language meets math (or maybe not or not not or not not not) but later, because I’ve been up all night, my mind is playing tricks on me, sleep deprivation is making everything transcendental and irrational(now it sounds like Faith) and I can’t even hit the correct keys on my keyboard. Just writing this entailed making many corrections. I’m so tired and confused that this might not make any sense.

      1. “Are you equating logical connectors with logical operators?”
        Yes, I think you have that all right. Other famous connectors correspond to the English ‘and’, and to ‘or’ both the usual exclusive and the mathematicians’ inclusive
        (so [P or Q] for them includes ‘P and Q’ as a possibility). The unary ‘not’ and the binary ‘and’ are all that’s needed for combinations to express all others, including trinary, etc. See
        https://uwaterloo.ca/pure-mathematics/sites/ca.pure-mathematics/files/uploads/files/log.web_.2006.pdf
        for a very elementary version for those with some ‘symbol affinity’.

        ” it seems to go to the place where language meets math” You’re correct there as well.

  15. Of course if you allow totally boring things, you can easily make a word longer than any specified length. Furthermore it can have a perfectly clear and easily determined meaning:
    For length > 100, just repeat the four letters ‘anti’ a total of 24 times, then follow it by ‘racism’. That means the same as ‘antiantiracism’, and really the same as ‘racism’ itself. For the opposite meaning, repeat enough times, but an odd number of times. Fortunately we can negate without an added word–not so easy with other logical connectives.
    The word in the original here is not much less boring, except for the historical connection, nor less trivial to invent.

    1. I’ll have to solve that dreaded double dose–something wrong in my login.

  16. Here is a longer word:

    ForaspecialandrarebreakfastIgrilltwogloucestershireoldspotsageandninetypercentshoulderandbellyporksausageswithtwoslicesofdryagedbackbaconwithroastedcrunchypotatoesservedonawarmedplateandseasonwellwithsaltandblackpepperplusadrizzleofmaltvinegarontheroastiesandworcestershiresauce

    1. Surely the word ‘word’ has some sort of reasonably exact definition. And surely that definition does not allow simply taking any sentence and deleting the spaces between its words. And to avoid looking for any particular long sentence, just delete the periods (dots, fullstops,–) between sentences and replace each with ‘and’.

      1. The Greek ‘word’ in the OP is nothing but a list of ingredients with instructions [pour this over that]. It qualifies as a word only in the sense that it’s a string of symbols with no gaps.

        If people want to call THAT a word, then I can do my thing with “and” included if I so choose. It’s all a load of bulwarks using such loose restrictions on construction – be it your rules or mine.

        1. I strongly disagree with you on this, i.e., that “it’s nothing but a list of ingredients with instructions…”

          There’s a lot more going on. Please see my comment at #19.

          And check out the Deipnosophists as an example of this kind of deep linguistic play. Nothing is trivial, no matter how trivial it may seem to us. The Greeks, Romans, and the Arabs (in times of yore, in their adab) were phenomenal wordsmiths and consciously drew on every aspect of their language when they wrote. There are satirical books about grammar! Lots of conscious grammatical play in the Deipnosophists. Wordplay abounds, not just humorous, but damned deep, complex and meaningful in more ways than one. I’ve seen no counterpart in American or even English literature.

          2. Watch out for overpressurizationalityoftheskullicularcasement. Be sure to loosen the neck bolts. 😎

          3. Thank you rickflickery goodly advicemole, but graticiusly I’m fullistic alleared to the needungt felicitudent accest of the ENCABULATOR – which I’ve boraleted for cromulent vertabrael alinmints [green ones only]. IKEA might want it back though.

          5. The explication was a wee bit hard to follow, but I became more gromulated as the presentation glecknifide toward the endipherous concludicus. Science is amazeballs. Thanks for the fractabulous linkendorf.

          6. This thread, from your remark here to the end is so funny. I love it. Wish I could join in but I’ve lost my touch. It’s an example of a kind of linguistic parody that’s well known from minstrel shows, but by no means exclusively limited to racial parody. I don’t know if it has a special name, if not, it should. I think you must be familiar with this sort of linguistic spoofing because of the way you express it. I used to be pretty adept at making up those kinds of nonce words and loopy syntax, and once wrote a rather long letter entirely in that style to an arrogant, uncaring physician who thought I was an idiot, because I was at my wit’s end trying to crack through her carapace of indifference and thought a bit of levity might get through to her.

            I mixed various languages in compound words, a little Greek, a little Yiddish (though I know neither but that didn’t matter), a little this and that; and made certain that the words and syntax actually made sense, if weird sense, so that I could defend my coinages, ridiculous though they were. She never said a thing about my missive,and to my great chagrin it slowly dawned on me that since she considered me an imbecile, she must have thought that it was actually I wrote, despite the fact that I didn’t speak that way. No matter; it was laborious task but great fun to write.

          8. Over the years quite a few medical students & docs in the UK go into comedy – stand up usually. It must be due to the funny bone being enhanced via ‘smokers’ [the students] & the survival value of humour when confronted day-to-day with a medico’s lot. Your doc being an exception.

            My excuse is quality drugs such as Monkey Shoulder & Château de Pellehaut Armagnac Ténarèze. Rickflick I think is just fried in the head from birding.

          9. “quite a few medical students & docs in the UK go into comedy”

            Yes, and I think Jonathon Miller (now a ‘Sir’) is, or was, the best of those. He was in ‘Beyond the Fringe’ with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore–but did much else at a very high level–theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter,–. I don’t know whether he actually ever practiced as a medical doctor.

          10. Jenny, I enthusiastically agree on Micheal and rickflick’s comedic talents. I wish I could do that too but I think my brain is worn out.

            Lewis Carrol did it quite well –

            ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
            Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
            All mimsy were the borogoves
            And the mome raths outgrabe.

            That is absolutely grammatical and syntactically correct English. The curious thing is that I can be confident of that statement even though every noun, adjective and verb in it is a nonsense word.

            (Except it should be ‘borogroves’ – I’m certain of that. It just runs better. Carroll mis-spelled it. 😉

            cr

          11. Your borogove spelling with the “r” is popular on the googles – suggesting it might be natural [or even more natural] with than without. I like both versions just so long as the voice is correct; a Scottish accent with a definite burr & a tone of grief or despair [“we’re all doomed”! or the The Tay Bridge Disaster voice] is how I hear it. The Disney film of the poem is horrible – it’s criminally upbeat & jolly!

          13. Interestingly, I’m just reading Pinker’s ‘The Language Instinct’ and when I made that comment re Jabberwocky I had a mental bet that Pinker would reference it at some point. And I’ve read a bit further and I was right, Pinker does, and he agrees with me! 😎

            Except of course, Pinker explains why we know it’s grammatical, where I had just noticed it as a curious fact.

            cr

          14. Sorry Jenny, I have to disagree, the fact that Aristophanes had a point to make still doesn’t turn his confection into a valid word. Michael also had a point to make with his atrocity upthread – pretty much the same point as Aristophanes, if I read your description (at #19) of how he came to coin it aright.

            cr

  17. I once asked a teacher how to spell “llama”. He told me to look it up, which I’d already tried, of course. It took me quite a while to realize he didn’t know. 🙂

    1. If the teacher knew, he could have quoted Ogden Nash:

      “There’s a one-l lama, he’s a priest;
      there’s a two-l llama, he’s a beast.
      But I will bet a silk pajama,
      There isn’t any three-l lllama.”

      Someone then wrote to Nash that a “three-l lllama” is a bad fire in Boston.

  18. Midieval Latin manuscripts typically used no word breaks or punctuation. By these standards the whole thing would be one word.

  19. According to https://longestwords.wordpress.com/tag/ancient-greek/, “It was originally coined by Aristophanes as poking fun at the fact that stringing together words to form compound words was common practice, and wanted to show an extreme version of the lengths that sometimes resulted in doing so.” That makes sense to me. It’s in a play, a play that sounds satirical and crude (the women take over government and the men run around in drag — but it’s not about women’s liberation) and I doubt that Aristophenes threw it in the written text simply in order to jam words together to save space, not in a play. and iIt had to be uttered on stage. The audience must have found it exceedingly funny for a number of reasons. I’d also bet that many of the components of the word carry satirical meanings that a non-classicist isn’t aware of. The Greeks were into word play and words with multiple meanings, and freighted with etymological historical, legendary resonances, that they would know. Unfortunately, we don’t write or think like that. We’re skimmers of the surface and, in general, that’s about all we see and all we care to see or take in. Examining the breakdown of the word in the above wordpress post makes me think this is what’s going on, at least in part. The Deipnosophists engage in this kind of deep wordplay, including grammar, and then discuss it. The passage from the Deipnosophists that I quoted above is incredibly rich in allusions to all kinds of things. To compare Helen to an eel, as is done later in the chapter, isn’t just to be amusing, they know what it refers to; and they go into Aristotle and other Greeks who’ve written about eels — for a reason; there’s a lot more going on than just yucks (in both senses of the word).

    Beyond all this, this is an interesting post on the Critical Inquiry website https://critinq.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/the-election-of-aristophanes/. Yeah, CI is into the po mo scene, at least in part; but this is an article to read. It notes that Aristophenes also coined the term “demagogue” and the author of this post points out that many of Aristophenes’ plays foreshadow the insane things transpiring in our day. Agree or disagree with the post, it’s timely read, and makes me want to dig into Aristophenes, having read no more than a couple of his plays in school long ago.

    1. I have to disagree that it’s a valid word. Accepting that it was made up in the way you state, to make a point by carrying existing rules to extremes, that – to my mind – invalidates it as a normal word. I’m presuming that any legitimate word is coined to convey a specific meaning with reasonable conciseness and practicality. Beyond a certain length, it becomes impossible to remember it as a word, even though it is entirely feasible to comprehend it as a sentence. The difference is (aside from omitting spaces) that people are not normally expected to remember an entire sentence ‘word-perfect’ and faulted for wrong spelling if they change a constituent word.

      cr

      1. I didn’t mean to imply that I considered it a “legitimate” word in the restrictive and utilitarian sense that you permit. I’d call it, perhaps, a deviant word. It’s word play. Word play is not by definition trivial, though of course it can be and frequently is; but it can also yield profound meaning/s. He was a writer of comedies, and the ‘word’ occurs in a play, and when one looks at the breakdown in
        https://longestwords.wordpress.com/tag/ancient-greek/, each element contains meaning and relevance and it’s all very silly but not meaningless, at least that’s the way I see it.

        As for the ability to say it, I would assume that the actor who vocalized the word had rehearsed enough to be able to pronounce it, and with brio. But now I’d like to ask a classicist and I think I will.

        1. Hi Jenny. I’m not sure “valid” was quite the right word for me to use. I have no doubt Aristophanes’ full word does carry meaning, but then every part of a sentence also carries meaning.

          As I see it, if one starts off with a word carrying a complex meaning, then adding more elements to it will increase the specificity of the meaning and limit it to particular circumstances, which will become more and more rare the longer the word gets. A sentence conveying the same meaning will tend to be longer but has the advantage of being made up of shorter more common words in a grammatical relationship to each other which makes the meaning more transparent. At some point the ‘overhead’ of remembering the very long word will outweigh the utility of it and it will drop out of use.

          That’s my theory anyway. I hope I didn’t make it too confusing.

          For example ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ is probably pushing the limit for a word in English. German with its habit of agglutinating words may go further.

          I’m not trying to diss wordplay here. I’m sure the actor who used Aristophanes’ word would be able to remember it, after all part of an actor’s job is to learn their ‘lines’.

          cr

          1. I think we’re talking about different things, different aspects of the same thing. I agree with what you say, but not that it applies here to what I’m referring to re a literary work. I’m not speaking about the length of the word itself or the quantity of its components but the quality of its components and that each component can in itself, if you let it, take the reader or hearer to all manner of ‘places’ consciously or subconsciously, resonances of history, natural history, folklore, who knows what else. The catalog of ingredients,when combined, does become a ‘fricassee’ or a stew, in which the disparate elements are slowly cooked r\together until the flavors blend and enhance each other and it becomes something more than a mere aggregation. Also,they don’t lose their individual identities; it’s a fricassee, not mush. T
            he more I know about the ingredients in something I’m cooking, the more I appreciate the dish, even though that knowledge isn’t critical to its gustatory or nutritional value; the same with what I read or write. Knowing what the Greeks thought about eels (or any other ingredient in the list certainly enriches my reading of the Deipnosophists, or this play, even though I sure can enjoy them without knowing much about the background or elements. Furthermore, just scanning the list, on that blog informs me that there areilluminating puns and wordplay generated from the individual ingredients. Not all literary works are composed this way; I’m speaking about the ones that are.

      2. To clarify, I didn’t make the statement you object to; the author of the post made the statement, though I agree with it.

    2. Aristophanes probably wrote it as a joke but remember that we don’t receive these texts from some Ancient Greek publisher all bound and edited. They were transcribed by hand, usually onto vellum or Papyrus, most likely some sort of vellum, , to preserve and copy them and often by monks throughout the Middle Ages. It’s how many copy mistakes and translation mistakes get passed down.

      1. I’m confident that this is deliberate; scholars would surely have smelled a rat if it were a scribal error or something untoward. It’s spoken of as a friccase and that it is, not just a simple collection of elements. In the event, I’ve asked a classical scholar to weigh in and tell me what is going down with this word.

        1. If the word were a mouse, Hili would settle the matter once and for all — down the hatch! It’s all the same in her stomach.

        2. Sure – it probably is intended – my point is, it isn’t a normal word that Greeks used all the time and that often these types of things are misunderstood because the texts are misunderstood. In other words, one should be aware of the context outside the text, especially with Ancient texts.

  20. I wonder what would have happened to the record if an agglutinating language like, say, Inuktitut got written early. 🙂

    Also “antidisestablishmentarianism” has always bugged me, because “antidisestablishmentarianastically” seems plausible and is longer (and doesn’t require repetition of the prefix).

    1. Yes, valid point. I was thinking the same thing, I would have submitted ‘pre-antidisestablishmentarianism’ but yours is better (and longer!)

      But that’s always possible to do.

      I’m just reading Pinker’s ‘The Language Instinct’ and he made exactly the same point, but about sentences – he cited the longest ever sentence (in the Guinness Book of Records, something from ?Faulkner, IIRC) and then pointed out that he could easily beat it with ‘Faulkner wrote, ” [quote the sentence] ”
      – but then he could be trumped by “Pinker said, ‘Faulkner wrote, ” [sentence] “‘ – and so on.

      So the limit is infinity.

      But I think there’s a practical limit for everyday language where the word becomes too long to remember, or where a sentence is so long one can no longer grasp (or remember) all of it in one go.

      cr

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