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Wikipedia article.

created Sep 7th 2014, 14:03 by Nehemiah Thomas


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A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.
 
The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine for the protein also known as titin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. In nature, DNA molecules can be much bigger than protein molecules and therefore potentially be referred to with much longer chemical names. For example, the wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs,[15] so the sequence of one of its strands, if written out in full like Adenilyladenilylguanilylcystidylthymidyl..., would be about 8 billion letters long. The longest published word, Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso...serine, referring to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus, was 1,185-letters long, and appeared in the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966.[16] In 1965, the Chemical Abstracts Service overhauled its naming system and started discouraging excessively long names.
 
John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one sexmilliaquingentsexagintillion, coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 103(6560+1) = 1019683. Under the long number scale, it would be 106(6560) = 1039360.
 
Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis is sometimes cited as the longest binomial name—it is a kind of amphipod. However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
 
Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is the longest accepted binomial name. It's a species of soldier fly.[17]
 
Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother (1675–1737).[18] The word is composed of the following elements:
 
Aequeo: equal (Latin, aequo[19])
Salino: containing salt (Latin, salinus)
Calcalino: calcium (Latin, calx)
Ceraceo: waxy (Latin, cera)
Aluminoso: alumina (Latin)
Cupreo: from "copper"
Vitriolic: resembling vitriol

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