I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

  • jandrese

    What, they couldn’t toss another Methyl group on there or something to make an even longer word?  I don’t think it counts when your “word” is just a transliterated chemical equation. 

    • vonbobo

      From wiki: The full chemical name, which starts methionyl… and ends …isoleucine, contains 189,819 letters and is sometimes stated to be the longest word in the English language, or any language.[19][20] However, lexicographers regard generic names of chemical compounds as verbal formulae rather than English words.

      • ldobe

        Precisely, if you want the longest English word, by this definition, we can compound a word that contains all of the experimentally determined as well as theorized chemical compounds thought to be in the universe while organizing them by arbitrarily discrete descriptions of every object in the universe.

        Not a word any more than a recipe for cherries jubilee is a word.

        • noah django

          which buffers my thought:  numbers are words, numbers are infinite; if a chemical compound is admissible as a candidate for the longest word, there is a large number that has more syllables, I’m sure.

          • ldobe

            Wait, how do you write 151 in prose?
            I render it as “one hundred fifty one” which is multiple words. Or a less easily contested example: 100 one hundred.

            And now I’m thinking: we run out of names for orders of magnitude fairly quickly. The highest I can think of is decillion, but I’m sure there are formulaic names for higher orders of magnitude, perhaps something like uni/monodecillion, then dodecillion and so on. So I guess formulaicly generated names for numbers could be arbitrarily long, since there’s arbitrarily large numbers. But they’re not in the english lexicon any more than the Space Needle is a part of the Bejing Metropolitan Area.

            Then there’s scientific notation, where big numbers can be described verbally such as “ten raised to the decillionth power.”

          • noah django

            nuts.  i was thinking of the hyphenation rule for compound numbers, but after consulting my Harbrace, it only applies to numbers between twenty-one through ninety-nine.  so 151 is “one hundred fifty-one,” but to the larger issue, you’re completely right.  multiple words.  i will shut up now.

          • ldobe

            noah django
            Why shut up when we’re having a pleasant discourse?
            (Caveat, it’s 2:24 AM in my timezone, so I’ll be sleeping, most likely if you reply)

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=729155295 July Eccles

            This recitation is so inane it may as well be of a long number, as far as I’m concerned.

          • Wreckrob8

            But in German four hundred and twenty-four would be vierhundertvierundzwanzig.

    • chenille

      Also, they’re international names. So if you did have some reason to count this as the longest word in English, it really ought to be the longest word in Russian, too.

      • dtakt

        Hm, no. Well, I don’t speak russian very well but most languages have translations of chemical moietys/functional groups. In swedish for example, methyl translates to metyl  and thus is shorter.

  • Karnzarnit

    And that, kids, is the incantation to summon an Eldritch Horror!

  • swankgd

    There’s something fishy about potted flowers that wilt and going from clean-shaven to 7:45 shadow in just 3.5 hours.  

    • dnebdal

       No idea about the plant, but I’ve been in the army with people that had to shave twice per day.

      • http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

         Richard Nixon had to shave three times a day.

    • ocker3

       Considering this is the CEO of Esquire magazine (in Russia), I think this might be part of a big prank

    • oasisob1

      It happens suddenly around 2:09 and some seconds.

      • Jonathan Roberts

        The plant, not the beard. Skipping forward to 2:05 and 2:15, there’s not that big a difference. If you go in 10 minute segments, it seems to be fairly even growth.

  • dnebdal

    I’ll admit I skipped ahead to the end. Bonus detail: He grows an admirable amount of beard in those three hours.

  • http://www.facebook.com/JRob78750 Jim Robertson

    That’s ridiculous, there’s no limit to an IUPAC name. 
    Like the polypeptide name in the article, they can be of any length.

    • serpent

      Considering this is one of the largest known proteins, this might not be possible. Of course you can construct a longer polypeptide chain, but it would not be the same. However, I’m curious, did he recite the name of human titin (34,350 aminoacid residues) or its mouse homologue (35,213 aa) or even the naked mole rat (36,507).

  • DevinC

    “Okay, before we hire you on here at Prolix Labs Inc., what’s your typing speed in words per minute?”

    “Err…0.00145?”

    “Great!”

  • Steve Ryan

    When I was a kid, I ran across pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis in the dictionary, and I still remember it. Like this one, though, medical terms don’t really seem like legitimate contenders for the “longest word” title.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1566210660 Bryce Caron

       My old man made my siblings and I memorize that when we were 7 or 8. That was after we learned antidisestablishmentarianism. I say “made” but we were all happy to do it. Indentured nerditude and all.

      • CCinBmore

         Never thought we’d find a good band name in this thread but there it is, “Indentured Nerditude”

    • http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

      Yeah, I used to impress almost everyone with that one…

    • Beanolini

      I still remember it.

      Me too. I also memorised Aristophanes’ fricassee (183 letters), but I can’t remember more than about a third of it now…

    • Wreckrob8

      For kids in the UK after antidisestablishmentarianism and floccinaucinihilipilification (both in the OED but not Websters) you can try memorising the Welsh place name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (if you can work out what all those w’s and l’s are doing). Something to do on the long, boring car journey to Wales.

      • http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises

        And speaking of names, let us not forget about ol’ Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvoralternwarengewissenhaftschaferswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangreifendurchihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenwanderersteerdemenschderraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelchegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevonverstandigmenschlichkeitkonntefortplanzenundsicherfreuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum, Senior!  Now there’s a long name.

    • http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises

      One also runs across this as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniosis, by which form I became acquainted with it in my youth.  I find the version you cite rather long-winded, frankly.

  • http://www.bauartcreative.com/ Bauart

    This will make a GREAT bar trick… “Hey, I’ll bet you $100 bucks you can’t sit and watch this guy say the longest word, and not want to kill yourself!”

  • http://www.facebook.com/obive Charlie Hayes

    What ever happened to antidisestablishmentarianism?

    • heckblazer

      It got disestablished.

      • http://twitter.com/trempls tré

         Damn! I oppose that.

    • Paul Renault

       Some people’s reaction to antidisestablishmentarianism?  Floccinaucinihilipilification.

      Of course, everyone knows that the longest word in the english language is smiles. 

      There’s a mile between the two s’s.

  • http://segonmedia.com/ Seg

    Great, now everyone knows my password. :(

  • taras

    From the pronunciation, he is actually saying it in Russian, not English.

  • machinestate

    3:15:42, missed a valyl

  • TC Teo

    cute. 2:09:22 clip is spliced and the plant instantaneously wilts

  • E T

    In Englis?

  • cwthomas

    In Mother Russia… We make those who speak out read really long and complicated English words, without water!

  • MashTheStampede

    In Russian, it occasionally sounds as if he’s saying the words for (in the male sense) “spilled” and “tired out”.  

  • zombiebob

    I just had a mini-seizure listening to that

  • https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel Shnatsel

    In fact he’s saying that word in Russian (I can tell – I’m Russian), but chemical names are almost international because they’re derived from Latin roots.

  • miasm

    I wonder at what point the lexical information density of a word passes the threshold of complexity necessary to support a conjunctive interpretation representing a virtual environment capable of supporting thinking entities which can in turn utter words of… ah nevermind.

  • Jonathan Roberts

    With words like that, it’s a wonder scientists get any work done.

  • http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

    pfff… Warhol was doing that in the 60′s.

    Impressed by commenters’ self-restraint in not mentioning Monty Python’s longest name sketch…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDPqB9i1ScY

  • http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises

    The longest word in the English language in common usage, I’ve read, is characteristically, though I’ve been to some neighborhoods where this is likely not the case.