WORDS

Longest Lengthy concatenations and some compound or agglutinative words or nonce words are or have been written in the closed-up style of a single word. The longest known example is a compound '"word" of 195 Sanskrit characters (which transliterates into 428 letters in the Roman alphabet) describing the region near Kanci, Tamil Nadu, India. The word appears in a 16th-century work by Tirumalamba, Queen of Vijayanagara.

English The longest word in the Oxfond English Dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (-koniosis), which has 45 letters and allegedly means "a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust." It is, however, described as "factitious" by the editors of the dictionary.

Longest scientific name The systematic name for dearyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the human mitochondria contains 16,569 nucleotide residues and is thus c. 207,000 letters long. It was published in key form in Nature on 9 Apr 1981.

Longest palindromes The longest known palindromic word (a word that reads the same backward or forward) is saippuakivikauppias (19 letters), ` which is Finnish for "a dealer in lye" (caustic soda). The longest in English is tattarrattat, with 12 letters, which appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Some baptismal fonts in Greece and Turkey bear the circular 25-letter inscription NIPPON ANOMHMATA MH.M.ONAN OISIN, meaning "wash (my) sins not only (my) face."

Longest anagnams The longest nonscientific English words that can form anagrams are the 17-letter transpositions repesentationism and misrepresentation. The longest scientific transposals are hydruxydesarycorticosteone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones, with 27 letters.

Abbreviations Longest The initials S.K.O.M.K.P.K.J.C.D.P.W.B., which stand for the Syarikat Kerjasama Orang-orang Melayu Kerajaan Hilir Perak Kerana Jimat Cermat Dan Pinjam-meminjam Wang Berhad, are the Malay name for The Cooperative Company of the Lower State of Perak


Guinness Book of World Records 1995 -- page 324