Quezi

Dictionary and Glasses (photo by Southernpixel - CC-BY)

The longest word in a recognized English language dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, but few people would ever have used that word or heard it spoken. So what is the longest word that is in everyday speech?

I wasn’t sure how to define common usage, so I settled on a completely arbitrary criterion: the word needed to have at least a million results returned by a Google search. This is somewhat approximate, because the Google results can vary according to which server you connect to and other factors, but I think it’s sufficient for this purpose. Also, as the internet grows the cutoff of one million results will need to be revised upwards.

Computers that run Linux generally include a dictionary file, listing words one per line. It was straightforward to extract the words of 20 letters or longer using the following shell command:

cat /usr/share/dict/linux.words | grep ‘………………..’ | grep -v’-’ | less

That command returns a list which consists mostly of specialized technical terms or rather contrived-sounding words. I browsed the list, checking the number of Google results for every word that struck me as being in common usage.

I thought I had found the answer, with a search for autobiographically returning over 40 million results, however this was illusory because Google also matches on related words and most of those results were actually for autobiographical. Adding a plus sign to a Google search cuts these out, and a search for +autobiographically only returns 90 thousand results.

I struck gold with +uncharacteristically, which returns 2.3 million results.

This is not a definitive answer, because I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but for now I’m considering uncharacteristically to be the longest English word in common usage. I welcome further suggestions in the comments, and if longer words come to light I will incorporate them into this answer.