• Question: Hi! What is the longest science word you know!!!! thanks From Izzy

    Asked by to Del, Catherine, John, Krishna, Mo Rassul on 14 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Catherine Mansfield

      Catherine Mansfield answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      The longest scientific word is ‘Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’. It is a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.

    • Photo: Adelle Thrower

      Adelle Thrower answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism Which is an inherited disorder that affects the thyroid. I don’t think it’s as long as Catherine’s word though!!

    • Photo: John Foster

      John Foster answered on 16 Mar 2014:

      Catherine and Adelle have picked very good words!

      Chemists like to make compounds which have very long names indeed, although they might not be considered single words as they are made up of lots of smaller ones and have numbers in. E.g. (5,10,15,20-tetrakis(alpha,alpha,alpha-2-pivalamidophenyl)porphyrin)

      You could even take a protein and call it by the name of all the amino acids in its structure, for some proteins this would make a very long word indeed. But as with chemical names, these are really just lots of little words put together.

    • Photo: Krishna Mohan Surapaneni

      Krishna Mohan Surapaneni answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word according to the Oxford Dictionaries

      But,

      the Chemical name of TITIN, the largest known protein is the LONGEST WORD with 189,819 letters having in it……..

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