Technical Terms
A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.
Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis is sometimes cited as the longest binomial name—it is a kind of amphipod. However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is the longest accepted binomial name. It's a species of soldier fly
Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother (1675–1737). The word is composed of the following elements:
- Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo)
- Salino: containing salt (Latin, salinus)
- Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
- Ceraceo: waxy (Latin, cera)
- Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
- Cupreo: from "copper"
- Vitriolic: resembling vitriol
John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one sexmilliaquingentsexagintillion, coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 103(6560+1) = 1019683. Under the long number scale, it would be 106(6560) = 1039360.
Names of chemical compounds can be extremely long if written as one word, as is sometimes done. An example of this is sodiummetadiaminoparadioxyarsenobenzoemethylenesulphoxylate, an arsenic-containing drug. There are also other chemical naming systems, using numbers instead of "meta", "para" etc. as descriptive dividers, breaking up the name, which then no longer can be considered a single long word.
The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine which is involved in striated muscle formation. Its empirical formula is C132983H211861N36149O40883S693. A 1,185-letter example, Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso...serine, refers to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus and was published by the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966. It marks the longest published word before in 1965, the Chemical Abstracts Service overhauled its naming system and started discouraging excessively long names.
The words Internationalization and localization are abbreviated "i18n" and "l10n", respectively, the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last.
Read more about this topic: Longest Word In English
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