2 November 16:10
The longest word in the Russian language is a 55-letter adjective “tetrahydropyranylcyclopentyltetrahydropyridopyridine,” experts from the Pushkin Institute of Russian Language found out.
As Pavel Katyshev, head of the department of general and Russian linguistics at the institute, told RIA Novosti, this word appears in the title of the 2006 patent for an invention.
Tetrahydropyranylcyclopentyltetrahydropyridopyridine is the name of a group of compounds that have a substituent containing the structures of pyridine (six-membered aromatic ring with a nitrogen atom) and cyclopentane (five-membered carbon ring).
The rules of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry IUPAC (IUPAC) imply the name of chemical substances using roots and prefixes in such a way that it can be used to unambiguously (although not always easily) reconstruct the chemical structure. Theoretically, these rules make it possible to obtain words of unlimited length, although, of course, not all of them are actually used in scientific literature and patents.
For example, the largest known protein, titin, consists of 38,138 amino acids, and its name according to IUPAC rules, accordingly, consists of the same number of roots: “methylthreonylthreonyl<...>isoleucine.” In 2012, the journalist and editor-in-chief of the Russian Esquire recorded a video where he read the entire name of titin according to IUPAC rules, which took about 3.5 hours without interruption. The video has collected more than a million views.
In 2003, the Guinness Book of Records listed the longest word in the Russian language as the adjective “extremely considerate” with 35 letters, RIA Novosti notes.
