The longest words in English

Questions about this list

What is the the longest words collection?

Single words of sixteen letters or more, ordered by how likely you are to have met them. It holds 1,144 entries drawn from the 147,478 in AltF Lexicon.

How was this list of the longest words put together?

Membership is decided by a property of the word you can check yourself — its letters, its syllables or where its stress falls — applied to every entry in the corpus.

What is the most common of the the longest words?

misunderstanding — it sits in the top commonness band of the words stored for this list. The list is ordered by commonness, so the words most readers already half know come first and the specialist tail comes last.

What is the longest word in this collection?

dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, at 31 letters. The average across the list is 6.7 syllables per word.

Does this page show every one of the 1,144 words?

No. 1,144 entries match the rule; the page carries the first 600 of them, ranked by commonness. The remainder are all still in the dictionary and reachable by search or by browsing A–Z.

• Words with double letters18,322Words containing a repeated letter side by side — the commonest source of spelling mistakes.
• Hyphenated words7,048Compounds English has half-joined and not yet finished joining.
• Words that start and end alike3,922At least five letters long, first letter equal to last.
• Three-letter words1,294All three-letter entries, ranked by commonness.
• Words with all five vowels1,117Every word that manages a, e, i, o and u at least once.
• Two-letter words446The complete two-letter vocabulary — the list every word-game player eventually memorises.
• Words with silent letters333Words whose spelling carries a letter the pronunciation does not — identified by comparing letter count with syllable structure across the commonest silent patterns.
• Words without vowels325Words spelled without a, e, i, o or u — most of them lean on y, and a few on nothing at all.
• Letters in alphabetical order107Words at least five letters long whose letters never go backwards through the alphabet.