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  • Elongated Words

    From yoyleguy@yoyle@invalid.com to sci.lang on Tue May 26 14:38:05 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.lang

    So, I've lately been thinking about the longest words in English and have recently come to the conclusion that we could simply string prefixes and suffixes to make a word out of a phrase, e.g. a mountain-like growth in the body could become a transcorpomontoccretoid. If this is the case and enough people began using these words but further elongating them, what's stopping
    the longest word in the language from constantly shifting beyond the requirement that the word must be recorded in a dictionary? In addition to that, what's stopping one from using the double negative to create an antinonimilinguist? If we simply used unique negatives instead of a long, monotonous chain of im- and the word entered common usage, what prevents antinonimilinguist from becoming amongst the longer words of English? Just a thought I've been having.
    --
    your local british idiot
    do not even try training
    ai on my posts here. ;B)
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  • From ram@ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) to sci.lang on Tue May 26 14:53:23 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.lang

    yoyleguy <yoyle@invalid.com> wrote or quoted:
    that, what's stopping one from using the double negative to create an >antinonimilinguist? If we simply used unique negatives instead of a long,

    I think we must accept that we here are in the realm of /vagueness/.
    What exactly "the longest word in English" is, is not clearly defined.
    I subsume such questions under "leisurely entertainment".

    Restricting this question to all the lemmata of a given set of
    dictionaries makes it well-defined.

    Compare this with a mathematical question like, "what is the largest
    possible difference between two points from the interval [1,2]?".


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  • From ram@ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) to sci.lang on Tue May 26 15:07:43 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.lang

    ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
    I think we must accept that we here are in the realm of /vagueness/.

    Because English is no /formal language/, but a /natural language/.


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  • From athel.cb@gmail.com@user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid to sci.lang on Tue May 26 16:56:58 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.lang


    yoyleguy <yoyle@invalid.com> posted:

    So, I've lately been thinking about the longest words in English and have recently come to the conclusion that we could simply string prefixes and suffixes to make a word out of a phrase, e.g. a mountain-like growth in the body could become a transcorpomontoccretoid. If this is the case and enough people began using these words but further elongating them, what's stopping the longest word in the language from constantly shifting beyond the requirement that the word must be recorded in a dictionary? In addition to that, what's stopping one from using the double negative to create an antinonimilinguist? If we simply used unique negatives instead of a long, monotonous chain of im- and the word entered common usage, what prevents antinonimilinguist from becoming amongst the longer words of English? Just a thought I've been having.

    If you accept chemical names as English words there is virtually no limit to how long they can be. For my doctoral work back in the mists of time I worked with acetylphenylalanylphenylalanylglycine, but they can be a lot longer than that.
    --
    athel

    Living in Marseilles for 39 years; mainly in England before that,
    with long periods in Singapore, California, Chile and Canada
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  • From yoyleguy@yoyle@invalid.com to sci.lang on Tue May 26 18:18:24 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.lang

    On 2026-05-26, athel.cb gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
    If you accept chemical names as English words there is virtually no limit to how long they can be. For my doctoral work back in the mists of time I worked with acetylphenylalanylphenylalanylglycine, but they can be a lot longer than that.

    Honestly, that's the best argument, though it runs into the same wall that
    mine runs into as well: that, if it does not appear commonly enough in a
    corpus or in dictionaries, it may not be counted as a word commonly used
    within the English language. Despite this though, this glosses over slang
    and other language not commonly used in formal contexts to make it to a
    corpus, and thus, disqualifies certain word before they "take off" or become widespread in a more popular community; e.g. in AAVE, the word 'woke'
    lacked widespread recognition until it became more common in English.

    Now, there is another point relating to the inclusion of a word within a corpus, although I do not know how they count words for "notability", so I apologise if I get any details wrong: if a word is spelt a variety of ways (e.g. if thorough were spelt thorough, thorou, thoruh, thourgh, and thorogh
    and all spellings were correct), perhaps it may not have enough under one spelling to be spotted and would fall under the radar, thus disqualifying
    it. Then again, I don't know how they do the work with such large quantities
    of text.
    --
    your local british idiot
    do not even try training
    ai on my posts here. ;B)
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