ESL Blogs

I still remember that day, the day of more than three decades ago. That time I used to go to a barber's near my house daily in order to read newspapers. It was a time when people would visit this barber's for reading papers in addition to getting their hair cut. That day while going through a Malayalam newspaper, the readers' letter column caught my special attention on the grounds that there was a letter that contained a useful bit of information about a particular type of words in English. It was then that I thought about the longest words in English. The reader said in the letter that the longest word in English was none other than pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. This 45-letter long word is the name of a lung disease prevalent among the coal mine workers. Just by reading twice, I was able to memorize this word. Later on, having been attracted to recreational English, I collected many long words from various sources and put them in the pages of my books about the English language. It is interesting to note that the word hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian means "of long words".

Someone once said jokingly that the 'real' longest word is SMILES because there is a MILE from the first S to the last S. But he or she then did not remember that in this respect BELEAGUERED is the longest word because there is a LEAGUE (three miles) between BE and RED.