The Longest Word

Wikipedia lists eight words that (I would suggest) can only be thought of as examples of the "longest words in English". The longest of them all, by a huge margin, is a word for "The chemical composition of titin, the largest known protein". It has 189,819 letters and is the "longest known word overall by magnitudes. Attempts to say the entire word have taken two to three and a half hours ... whether this is a word is disputed".

Titin is also known as connectin; 'titin' itself is short for 'Titan protein'. Wikipedia abbreviates the word in question to "Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanyl ... isoleucine". It gives the complete word in an Appendix, where it lists 21 chemicals that make up the protein. All but one of their names appear hundreds of times in the word, some of them over 2,000 times. The one exception is 'isoleucine', which appears only once as the final component (see abbreviation quoted earlier in this paragraph).

And How Do They Know How Long It Takes to Say It?

The mathematically–inclined reader will have spotted that 210 minutes is exactly three and a half hours.

The web page that Wikipedia cites for the "three and a half hour" version is no longer available – not in my country or region, at least. But Google did find me a website, named Geekologie, which promises a YouTube video of someone actually doing it. Sadly the video is no longer available, but Geekologie does say that it takes 3 hours and 33 minutes, or 213 minutes.

However ... the YouTube video that Wikipedia cites to support its "two hour" assertion is still live. In it, someone does actually read the word out loud; and I can reveal that according to the YouTube timer, it takes 113 minutes and 51 seconds. (I obviously didn't watch the whole thing; I watched the beginning and skipped to the end.)

The crucial words in Wikipedia's entry, you might think, are "Attempts to say the entire word have taken two to three and a half hours". Such a wide variation! The video that I found takes just under two hours, but Google did find me plenty of websites that say it takes three and a half.

If you watch the two–hour video, or any part of it, you may feel that MrBeast (who, I've since discovered, is a hugely successful YouTuber) has no idea what he's reading, and completely mispronounces the majority of the word's elements. You may wonder how long it would take someone who did understand what they were reading; but I reckon anyone that fits that description would probably have better things to do with their time.

But we didn't need YouTube, or the reports of various other websites, to know that there can be no definitive answer to this tie–break question. Even 210 minutes is an approximation – for 213, if Geekologie is to be believed; and I myself have seen enough of MrBeast's effort to convince me that it can be done in less than 114 minutes. Clearly, it will just depend how fast you say it.

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