Thread: Looooooooong Russian words wanted

Thanks, it-ogo. If these are the records, then I guess there aren't many words that are over 20 letters? Do you know approximately how many? Maybe I need to lower my threshold to 17.

Originally Posted by Ann

Thanks, it-ogo. If these are the records, then I guess there aren't many words that are over 20 letters? Do you know approximately how many? Maybe I need to lower my threshold to 17.

The specifics of Russian language is a plenty of suffixes and prefixes which can be combined together to get something more or less meaningfull. Such combinations mostly are not in vocabularies and are colloquial in some uncertain degree. So it is often difficult to say what is valid Russian word and what is not and what does a word mean exactly without context.

Anyway such long words are not common way of expressing ideas in Russian.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

The specifics of Russian language is a plenty of suffixes and prefixes which can be combined together to get something more or less meaningful.

Just as in English, you can "stretch" the adjective microscopic (11 letters) into a 16-letter word by adding the prefix ultra-, and then turn the adjective into an adverb with the suffix -ally, for a grand total of 20 letters: ultramicroscopically.

You could even stretch this further with "nonce formations" like deultramicroscopicalization (27 letters) -- which, in a science-fiction context, could mean something like "the reversal (de-) of the process of making (-ization) something much much smaller," as happened at the end of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.