{"id":2277,"date":"2020-04-10T09:03:21","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T07:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/blog\/longest-words-world\/"},"modified":"2024-01-23T12:25:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T11:25:13","slug":"longest-words-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/en\/magazine\/longest-words-world\/","title":{"rendered":"What are the most difficult words in the world?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How many<strong>\u00a0difficult words are there in the world<\/strong>? And which language contains the most unpronounceable words? In reality, these are not questions that can be answered objectively, since, as linguists will know, a language\u2019s difficulty (like any aspect of human culture) is entirely subjective.<\/p>\n<p>As such,<strong>\u00a0unpronounceable words\u00a0<\/strong>don\u2019t truly exist, or rather, they\u2019re simply words that we\u2019re not used to. That\u2019s why a native Chinese Mandarin speaker might find it extremely difficult to pronounce an Arabic word, just as an Italian speaker might find it really tricky to replicate the aspirated sounds found in most Hebrew words.<\/p>\n<p>That being said, there are plenty of words out there that are real tongue twisters. Here are a few examples, want to have a go at pronouncing them?<\/p>\n<h2>The longest word in the world<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Long\u00a0<\/strong>words are definitely the most difficult to pronounce, since they require a lot of concentration and an ability to articulate sounds. One of the\u00a0<strong>longer words in the Italian language\u00a0<\/strong>is\u00a0<em>precipitevolissimevolmente<\/em>. It\u2019s used to describe an action carried out very hastily and its onomatopoeic sound gives the impression of someone tumbling down the stairs.<\/p>\n<p>However, this poor, mistreated adverb is no match for the<strong>\u00a0longest word in the world<\/strong>, which belongs to scientific language and is used to describe a protein. What\u2019s the word, you say? Well, we\u2019re not going to write it in this blog post because we don\u2019t have enough space! It\u2019s\u00a0<strong>189,819 letters\u00a0<\/strong>long and you probably don\u2019t have enough time to read it, seeing as it would take three and a half hours to do so. But what\u2019s the point of inventing a word that can\u2019t really be pronounced, written or read? Good question: ask the scientists!<\/p>\n<h2>Words that are impossible to pronounce<\/h2>\n<p>Among the words that are impossible to pronounce (for non-Icelanders, at least) is the name of the famous<strong>\u00a0Icelandic glacier\u00a0<em>Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(which is often mistaken for a volcano). In Icelandic, the word means \u2018island mountain glacier.\u2019 And the reason why there\u2019s often confusion between the glacier and the volcano is because the glacier covers Eyjafj\u00f6ll volcano, the one that decided to erupt in the middle of the night on 10 March 2010, creating a crater right in the middle of the glacier.<\/p>\n<p>On the opposite side of the world in\u00a0<strong>New Zealand<\/strong>, someone decided it was a good idea to use\u00a0<strong>85 letters\u00a0<\/strong>to name a hill: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu hill. Don\u2019t even try to pronounce it, there\u2019s no point. Just know that it means \u2018the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his k\u014dauau (flute) to his loved one.\u2019<\/p>\n<h2>A complicated word that everyone knows<\/h2>\n<p>There is one\u00a0<strong>word created just to be complicated\u00a0<\/strong>and which owes its fame precisely to its length and difficulty.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious<\/strong>\u00a0is a word invented for the film\u00a0<em>Mary Poppins<\/em>, made by Walt Disney in 1964. It may seem like one of the most meaningless and difficult words in the world, but it\u2019s actually a combination of words deriving from different languages, including Greek and Latin.<\/p>\n<p>Super (above), kali (beauty), fragilistic (delicate), expiali (atone) docious (able to learn) are the basic words that make up the<strong>\u00a0Mary Poppins tongue twister\u00a0<\/strong>and, with a little imagination, the word essentially means something like \u2018atoning for educability through delicate beauty.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How many\u00a0difficult words are there in the world? And which language contains the most unpronounceable words? In reality, these are not questions that can be answered objectively, since, as linguists will know, a language\u2019s difficulty is entirely subjective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":780,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The longest words in the world | Eurotrad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What are the most difficult words in the world? How long are they and what language do they belong to? Here\u2019s a short ranking of the weirdest words ever.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/en\/magazine\/longest-words-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The longest words in the world | Eurotrad\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What are the most difficult words in the world? How long are they and what language do they belong to? 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