the world's longest essay

This 1,288-Word Run-On Sentence Broke Records and Inspired Hundreds of Modern Writers

Longest Run-On Sentence by William Faulkner

William Faulkner in 1954 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain) This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase, My Modern Met may earn an affiliate commission. Please read our disclosure for more info.

Most book lovers would agree that coming across a very long sentence in a novel can sometimes require multiple reads to comprehend. The world of literature is full of examples of sprawling monologues and multi-line descriptions, but it was American writer William Faulkner who was featured in the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records for his lengthy passage from his 1936 book, Absalom, Absalom!

The huge run-on sentence consists of 1,288 words and countless clauses. It takes patience to read, but once you get into the rhythm, it’s like delving into Faulkner’s stream of consciousness. The experimental writer’s sentence style inspired hundreds of writers since, including Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and other masters of modern literature.

Nowadays, postmodern fiction writers such as John Barth are still influenced by Faulkner’s run-on technique. He once said, “It was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” The current record holder for the longest english sentence is Jonathan Coe for his staggering 33-page, 13,955-word sentence in The Rotter’s Club , 2001. Though the record has been broken, Faulkner's legacy lives on.

William Faulkner was featured in 1983 Guinness Book of World Records for this 1,288-word sentence from Absalom, Absalom! Try to read it without getting out of breath.

Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.

h/t: [ Open Culture ]

Behind the Scenes: How the British Library Digitizes One of the World’s Biggest Books

View Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks Online and Go Inside the Mind of a Genius

Library Places 1,600+ Occult Books Online With Help From ‘The Da Vinci Code’ Author

20+ Creative Gifts for People Who Love to Read

Get Our Weekly Newsletter

Learn from top artists.

Photography
Architecture
Environment

Absalom, Absalom! ">When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!

in Books , Literature , Writing | March 14th, 2019 36 Comments

Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons

“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “ reorchestrated ” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.

While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.

Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.

It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records , a passage from Absalom, Absalom! c onsisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons , to different effect.

But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.

Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.

Add a comment

Free Courses

Art & Art History
Classics/Ancient World
Computer Science
Data Science
Engineering
Environment
Political Science
Writing & Journalism
All 1500 Free Courses
1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses

Receive our Daily Email

Free updates, get our daily email.

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Free Movies

1150 Free Movies Online
Free Film Noir
Silent Films
Documentaries
Martial Arts/Kung Fu
Free Hitchcock Films
Free Charlie Chaplin
Free John Wayne Movies
Free Tarkovsky Films
Free Dziga Vertov
Free Oscar Winners
Free Language Lessons
All Languages

Free eBooks

700 Free eBooks
Free Philosophy eBooks
The Harvard Classics
Philip K. Dick Stories
Neil Gaiman Stories
David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays
Hemingway Stories
Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels
HP Lovecraft
Edgar Allan Poe
Free Alice Munro Stories
Jennifer Egan Stories
George Saunders Stories
Hunter S. Thompson Essays
Joan Didion Essays
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories
David Sedaris Stories
Stephen King
Golden Age Comics
Free Books by UC Press
Life Changing Books

Free Audio Books

700 Free Audio Books
Free Audio Books: Fiction
Free Audio Books: Poetry
Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction

Free Textbooks

Free Physics Textbooks
Free Computer Science Textbooks
Free Math Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Video Lessons
Web Resources by Subject
Quality YouTube Channels
Teacher Resources
All Free Kids Resources

Free Art & Images

All Art Images & Books
The Rijksmuseum
Smithsonian
The Guggenheim
The National Gallery
The Whitney
LA County Museum
Stanford University
British Library
Google Art Project
French Revolution
Getty Images
Guggenheim Art Books
Met Art Books
Getty Art Books
New York Public Library Maps
Museum of New Zealand
Smarthistory
Coloring Books
All Bach Organ Works
All of Bach
80,000 Classical Music Scores
Free Classical Music
Live Classical Music
9,000 Grateful Dead Concerts
Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive

Writing Tips

William Zinsser
Kurt Vonnegut
Toni Morrison
Margaret Atwood
David Ogilvy
Billy Wilder
All posts by date

Personal Finance

Open Personal Finance
Amazon Kindle
Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Comics/Cartoons
Current Affairs
English Language
Entrepreneurship
Food & Drink
Graduation Speech
How to Learn for Free
Internet Archive
Language Lessons
Most Popular
Neuroscience
Photography
Pretty Much Pop
Productivity
UC Berkeley
Uncategorized
Video - Arts & Culture
Video - Politics/Society
Video - Science
Video Games

Great Lectures

Michel Foucault
Sun Ra at UC Berkeley
Richard Feynman
Joseph Campbell
Jorge Luis Borges
Leonard Bernstein
Richard Dawkins
Buckminster Fuller
Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism
Jacques Lacan
Roland Barthes
Nobel Lectures by Writers
Bertrand Russell
Oxford Philosophy Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Great Recordings

T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land
Sylvia Plath - Ariel
Joyce Reads Ulysses
Joyce - Finnegans Wake
Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf
Albert Einstein
Charles Bukowski
Bill Murray
Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
William Faulkner
Flannery O'Connor
Tolkien - The Hobbit
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Dylan Thomas
Anne Sexton
John Cheever
David Foster Wallace

Book Lists By

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Allen Ginsberg
Patti Smith
Henry Miller
Christopher Hitchens
Joseph Brodsky
Donald Barthelme
David Bowie
Samuel Beckett
Art Garfunkel
Marilyn Monroe
Picks by Female Creatives
Zadie Smith & Gary Shteyngart
Lynda Barry

Favorite Movies

Kurosawa's 100
David Lynch
Werner Herzog
Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Luis Buñuel
Roger Ebert
Susan Sontag
Scorsese Foreign Films
Philosophy Films
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006

Advertise with Us
Copyright Policy
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use

Supported by

One Sentence Says It All

Share full article

Dec. 24, 2010

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep,” says the garrulous shoemaker who narrates the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age” (1964), “it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out.” Thirty-three pages into what appears to be an unbroken highway of text, the reader might well wonder if that’s a mission statement or an invitation. “Dancing Lessons” unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence that ends after 117 pages without a period, giving the impression that the opinionated, randy old cobbler will go on jawing ad infinitum. But the gambit works. His exuberant ramblings gain a propulsion that would be lost if the comma splices were curbed, the phrases divided into sentences. And there’s something about that slab of wordage that carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel.

Hrabal wasn’t the first to attempt the Very Long Sentence. The Polish novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski went even longer in “The Gates of Paradise” (1960), weaving several voices into a lurid and majestic 158-page run-on. (The novel actually consists of two sentences, the final one a mere five words long.) An old priest listens to the contradictory confessions of some apparently holy but actually just horny French teenagers marching toward Jerusalem in the 13th-century Children’s Crusade. A profusion of colons and dashes helps toggle among the multiple points of view, while repeated descriptions of crummy weather give the brain some breathing space. Every mention of the “long and arduous road” seems to comment on the enduring nature of the sentence itself. The descriptions of sex — e.g., “That’s why when we do it we can keep it going so long” — also gain a double meaning.

For a long time, Hrabal and Andrzejewski were the only practitioners of the sentence-long book I could find. Not many writers have had the nerve to go this route: you’re locked in, committed to a rhythm and a certain claustrophobia. But might the format also be liberating? Joan Didion told The Paris Review in 1978: “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” Sticking to just one sentence, ironically, might keep your options perpetually open.

The most famous mega-sentence in literature comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Molly Bloom’s monologue from “Ulysses” (1922) —36 pages in the thinly margined, micro-fonted 1986 single-volume corrected text (and actually two long sentences, thanks to an often-overlooked period 17 pages in) — sets an impossibly high standard for the art of the run-on. It breathlessly binds together all that comes before while nearly obliterating it, permanently coloring the reader’s memory in one final rush. It feels unstoppable, and then it stops.

Molly’s soliloquy is a touchstone for writers aiming to go long. A copy of “Ulysses” pops up in “Green Coaster,” the 33-page, single-sentence section that closes Jonathan Coe’s brilliant novel “The Rotters’ Club” (2001). (The BBC has reported that at 13,955 words, it is the longest sentence ever written in English.)

Joyce also makes a cameo in the most recent candidate for the absurdly exclusive Book-as-Sentence club, the French novelist Mathias Énard’s “Zone” (2008), just published in an English translation . At 517 pages, it’s far longer than the Hrabal and Andrzejewski combined, though its status as a true single sentence is compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain. (If “Zone” qualifies, what about Samuel Beckett’s 147-page “How It Is” (1961), with its paragraphic chunks but complete absence of periods?) A bigger disqualification for Énard’s book, about a train journey, is that three of the chapters are passages from a book the narrator is reading — a mediocre short story ripe with periods. If only he’d packed some Hrabal.

Even if the World’s Longest Sentence record is fraught with asterisks — does Hrabal truly qualify, if there’s no period at the end? What about early Greek writing, which had no spaces between words? — the allure of the form is, well, longstanding. An 800-plus worder in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” (1862) has sometimes (erroneously) been cited as the longest in French literature; its winding description of Louis Philippe as a ruler who hews to the middle of the road in every aspect (“well read and caring but little for literature,” “incapable of rancor and of gratitude”), damns the king’s modesty with the grandness of its design. Is it coincidence that, as Roger Shattuck points out, the longest sentence in Proust — 944 words — dissects the plight of the homosexual in society? And what about the last of the six immense paragraphs that constitute Gabriel García Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975), one mammoth sentence concluding with “the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end”?

For some writers, a chapter-long sentence is eternity enough. The Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt was inspired to write “The Assignment” (1986), his superbly paranoid late-career “novella in 24 sentences,” after listening to a recording of Glenn Gould playing the first 24 movements of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” (At 129 pages, that’s an average of 5.375 pages per sentence.) Here, the constraint sets up the potential for improvisation off a single musical line, while also allowing for clean breaks. The American writer Laird Hunt consciously adapted Dürrenmatt’s method in “Ray of the Star” (2009), in which a traumatic episode shadows a shell-shocked man’s sojourn in an unnamed foreign city. The man suffers from restless leg syndrome, and the affliction’s self-engendering quality (“the greater his fatigue the more pronounced it grew”) finds a mirror in Hunt’s labyrinthine sentences.

The Very Long Sentence could be seen as a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself. “I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period,” William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1944. “I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead.” (Faulkner, no stranger to the mind-expanding possibilities of the very long sentence, was once credited with a 1,400-worder by the Guinness Book of World Records.) In this age of 140-character Twitter posts — not to mention a persistent undercurrent of minimalism in our literature — there’s something profoundly rejuvenating about the very long sentence. For the sake of the novel, and ourselves, let’s hope that Hrabal wasn’t being prophetic when he wrote, four decades ago, “People twitter away like magpies and don’t really care.”

Ed Park is the author of “Personal Days,” a novel that ends with a sentence over 16,000 words long.

Poem Guides
Poem of the Day
Collections
Harriet Books
Featured Blogger
Articles Home
All Articles
Podcasts Home
All Podcasts
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Poetry Out Loud
Upcoming Events
All Past Events
Exhibitions
Poetry Magazine Home
Current Issue
Poetry Magazine Archive
Subscriptions
About the Magazine
How to Submit
Advertise with Us
About Us Home
Foundation News
Awards & Grants
Media Partnerships
Press Releases
Newsletters

Verse by the Yard

Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Print this page
Email this page

Don Pedro from his shirt has washed the fleas The bull’s horns ought to dry it like a bone Old corned-beef’s rusty armour spreads disease That suede ferments is not at all well known

Izzy Grinspan is managing editor of Jewcy.com. Her work has been published in Salon , The Believer , and The Village Voice .

Ah, quantity.

Was it Dylan Thomas who'd sit in his writing shed for hours... carefully inscribe the letter "O" ... and then go down to the pub, having done a full day's work on a poem?

henry like.

and the on the fifth day, a ship came down from the sky and clear across the medow, the birds began to fly. away, away, and down the hill to meet the dogs down by the mill. 1 hundred birds clutched each dog's furr and up they went, up they soared. past the ship and back again communicating with those within. I wondered if such things were so or if it was a dream although, it couldnt be, cuz it was raining, and each drop that fell on my skin tickled me everywhere and i could feel. the ship was gone and so where the animals up they went without a sound how 500 birds and 5 old dogs had managed to hitch a ride out to space is beyond my imagination's good grace. On the sixth day the oceans rose up to the sky, and fishes and sharks were swimming up high, the mass slowely floated outward for days, the world was dark in many ways, at last the oceans were floating in space and sunlight creeped in all over the place. On the 15th day the desert sand, sprouted legs and moved over the land, the large gaping holes where ocean's once were, were being filled in and leveling there. On the 16th day, the plants grew brown they wilted and wilted till they lay on the ground. on The 17th day the wind blew very hard and picked up the dust that was once my front yard and carried it carried it far far away untill hundreds of dust devils blew what they may, out of the atmosphere into the place where there is no sound or color to speak of. On the 18th day, the earth shook clean of every living and every dead thing it left its orbit and flew past the sun, cooking its self until it was done. I wasn' there because ide been launched out into space by a rocket. and strangely enough, everything missed us, we floated and floated, watching destruction and soon we realized there'd be no construction. tomorrow's the 19th day and I know a will die, let me just say that the dogs and the birds got pretty damn lucky those lucky damn turds.

i'd like to know who formulated that face symetry thing. it's clearly not working. ps. i'm too tired to leave a 'good' comment.

This is the only site that will pay you out daily.. So make 50 bucks your first night and you get paid it that night! Check em out its so easy to do you won't believe you are getting paid to do it.. Oh ya and its completely free. http://classofcashqdenpvtiu.bl...

Thank you. I read herelots of valuable sentences. Greetings from Poland.

Very funny pictures

Unfettered Spermomax I reconcile, that was a good enter! i want to combine The Penury of bulk pills You can be that geezer -- with VolumePills. Judge you can’t be that amazing? Admirably, on upward of it! Your existence can completely change when you’re packing this kind of confidence. You’ll banish any doubt or insecurity about your performance and your talent to proclaim the goods. With bigger semen mass, you’ll cum harder than you till doomsday considering possible. You’ll get a big boost to your testosterone levels, too, which means stronger bonking motivate, better erections and all-inclusive much improved procreant ability. And the ladies? That was a very nice notify! The tips are skilled, fraction it is unusually abstruse to follow them, well according to me, joined should examine semenpills to bourgeon prodcution, book and flavour. Yes its admissible to do naturaly, but it liking surely aid the casue lot. Spermomax - Sperm Enhancement Spermomax – Optimize your ejaculation bulk, lustful comfort, hardness and power. -Optimize your ejaculation volume -Feel the official amusement of shacking up -Get hardness and power of your penis -100% herbal & no side effect -Contains a gang of natural sex tonics and aphrodisiacs Get Complimentary Spermomax Now

What wondering voices here the call of pertent questioning. The rise in peaked sound resonates with time spent wondering in wood majestic and mystical. If you and I can imagine beauty stimulating more than this, than I can see towers not from twigs and soul powers that give us.....this...

Audio Poems
Audio Poem of the Day
Twitter Find us on Twitter
Facebook Find us on Facebook
Instagram Find us on Instagram
Facebook Find us on Facebook Poetry Foundation Children
Twitter Find us on Twitter Poetry Magazine
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Poetry Mobile App
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
© 2024 Poetry Foundation

180-foot bike certified as world's longest - and it's actually rideable

Eight engineering enthusiasts from the Netherlands have built the world’s longest bicycle .

Measuring an incredible 55.16 metres (180 ft 11 in), it’s around the same length as two blue whales or four double-decker buses.

The previous record was set in 2020 by Bernie Ryan (Australia), whose bike measured 47.5 m (155 ft 8 in).

The team was led by 39-year-old Ivan Schalk, who’s been planning this since he was a child.

He said: “I’ve been thinking about the idea for years. I once received a Guinness World Records book in which I came across this record.”

This record has been broken numerous times over the past 60 years. It was first set in 1965 by a bicycle built in Cologne, Germany, measuring 8 m (26 ft 3 in).

Past record holders have included people from various countries including New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and two teams from the Netherlands.

With a history of building carnival floats, Ivan embarked upon this project in 2018 to fill his spare time.

Needing help to build the behemoth bicycle, he sought out team members at the local carnival in his home village of Prinsenbeek.

“Prinsenbeek is known for its volunteers and high technical employability,” Ivan said.

“You can hang out in front of the TV, but we’re not like that here in Prinsenbeek.

“We have the technical knowledge and want to apply this knowledge to the maximum.”

Building the bicycle was a long process, interrupted for nearly two years by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The front and rear parts were produced in-house, whilst the centrepiece was purchased from a company that manufactures long steel structures.

For the purposes of this record, a bicycle is defined as a pedalled vehicle with two wheels, one behind the other, steered with handlebars attached to the front wheel.

Years of calculations and construction culminated in the official record attempt, where two of the team – one up front steering and another at the back pedalling – rode the bicycle over a 100-metre distance to achieve the Guinness World Records title.

They also achieved another record for the longest tandem bicycle by adding more pedals and completing the distance with multiple riders.

“We left nothing to chance in terms of safety,” Ivan said. “You can see this, for example, in the fact that the cyclists are not outside the structure, but inside it.”

The bicycle will now be exhibited in the Prinsenbeek local history museum.

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

An energy-rich future is within reach

The sun at dawn rising over a solar panel

Your browser does not support the <audio> element.

I t is 70 years since AT&T ’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa , where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper.

Another worry is that the vast majority of the world’s solar panels, and almost all the purified silicon from which they are made, come from China. Its solar industry is highly competitive, heavily subsidised and is outstripping current demand—quite an achievement given all the solar capacity China is installing within its own borders. This means that Chinese capacity is big enough to keep the expansion going for years to come, even if some of the companies involved go to the wall and some investment dries up.

In the long run, a world in which more energy is generated without the oil and gas that come from unstable or unfriendly parts of the world will be more dependable. Still, although the Chinese Communist Party cannot rig the price of sunlight as OPEC tries to rig that of oil, the fact that a vital industry resides in a single hostile country is worrying.

It is a concern that America feels keenly, which is why it has put tariffs on Chinese solar equipment. However, because almost all the demand for solar panels still lies in the future, the rest of the world will have plenty of scope to get into the market. America’s adoption of solar energy could be frustrated by a pro-fossil-fuel Trump presidency, but only temporarily and painfully. It could equally be enhanced if America released pent up demand, by making it easier to install panels on homes and to join the grid—the country has a terawatt of new solar capacity waiting to be connected. Carbon prices would help, just as they did in the switch from coal to gas in the European Union.

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter .

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The solar age”

Leaders June 22nd 2024

AI will transform the character of warfare
Emmanuel Macron’s project of reform is at risk
How to tax billionaires—and how not to
Javier Milei’s next move could make his presidency—or break it
India should liberate its cities and create more states

From the June 22nd 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

More from Leaders

Joe Biden should now give way to an alternative candidate

His last and greatest political act would help rescue America from an emergency

What to make of Joe Biden’s plans for a second term

His domestic agenda is underwhelming, unrealistic and better than the alternative

A pivotal moment for China’s Communist Party

Will Xi Jinping keep ignoring good advice at the party’s third plenum?

LLMs now write lots of science. Good

Easier and more lucid writing will make science faster and better

Macron has done well by France. But he risks throwing it all away

After the election, populists of the right and left could hobble a centrist president

Keir Starmer should be Britain’s next prime minister

Why Labour must form the next government

James Cropper Paper

Written Into History: World's Longest Letter

Cumbria’s Longest Letter Sets Official Record

When eight schools in Cumbria set out to write the World’s Longest Letter during National Stationery Week 2015, they hoped to set records for their epic writing efforts. Now it’s official, with the Official World Record organisation verifying the 290 metre letter as the longest letter believed to have ever been written.

Written on Ambassador paper, which is more often used for high-quality, commercial stationery, invitations and reports, the letter was started by children from Queen Katherine School, Castle Park School, Vicarage Park, Stramongate Primary School, Ghyllside Primary School, Grayrigg Primary School, St Oswald’s Primary School and St Thomas’ Primary School, all local to the James Cropper mill in Kendal, Lake District. Each child stepped up to say what it was about their local area that they loved, with the letter proposed to be part of the Lake District National Park’s bid for UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

In summer 2015, it was decided by James Cropper and the National Park that the public should have their say and the letter was displayed in Brockhole, the Lake District Visitor Centre, with visitors of all ages invited to put pen to the letter. As the letter grew in length, so did the strength of people’s feeling towards the famously beautiful region, which James Cropper calls home. Many heartfelt messages were left, acclaiming everything from the breath-taking scenery to fantastic local food.

When the time to measure the letter came and bring the attempt to an end in October, Peter Hensman, chair of the Lake District National Park Partnership’s Business Task Force, Tim Tidman, Product Manager at James Cropper Paper and children from three of the participating schools came together to celebrate the end of a fantastic effort. Now, with the letter verified as a world record just a few weeks after it was completed, Mr Hensman and the 25 organisations responsible for the Lake District’s bid for World Heritage status in 2016 will use the tributes to show the UNESCO judging panel just what the region means to so many people.

James Cropper PLC on Facebook
James Cropper PLC on Twitter
James Cropper PLC on LinkedIn

James Cropper Newsletter

Stay up to date.

Sign up for our newsletter

Black line drawing of people in red shirts talking

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

T urn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.

How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it.

For us, Bob and Marc, though we work closely together and meet every week by phone or video call, we see each other in person for only a total of about two days (48 hours) every year.

How does this add up for the coming years? Bob is 71 years old. Marc is 60. Let’s be (very) generous and say we will both be around to celebrate Bob’s 100th birthday. At two days a year for 29 years, that’s 58 days that we have left to spend together in our lifetimes.

Fifty-eight out of 10,585 days.

Of course, this is assuming a lot of good fortune, and the real number is almost certainly going to be lower.

Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates—the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As the study’s director (Bob) and associate director (Marc), we’ve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.

From the June 2009 issue: What makes us happy?

We don’t always put our relationships first. Consider the fact that the average American in 2018 spent 11 hours every day on solitary activities such as watching television and listening to the radio. Spending 58 days over 29 years with a friend is infinitesimal compared with the 4,851 days that Americans will spend interacting with media during that same time period. Distractions are hard to avoid.

Thinking about these numbers can help us put our own relationships in perspective. Try figuring out how much time you spend with a good friend or family member. We don’t have to spend every hour with our friends, and some relationships work because they’re exercised sparingly. But nearly all of us have people in our lives whom we’d like to see more. Are you spending time with the people you most care about? Is there a relationship in your life that would benefit both of you if you could spend more time together? Many of these are untapped resources, waiting for us to put them to use. And, enriching these relationships can in turn nourish our minds and bodies.

Y ou don’t have to examine scientific findings to recognize that relationships affect you physically. All you have to do is notice the invigoration you feel when you believe that someone has really understood you during a good conversation, or the tension and distress you feel after an argument, or how little sleep you get during a period of romantic strife.

In this sense, having healthy, fulfilling relationships is its own kind of fitness—social fitness—and like physical fitness, it takes work to maintain. Unlike stepping on the scale, taking a quick look in the mirror, or getting readouts for blood pressure and cholesterol, assessing our social fitness requires a bit more sustained self-reflection. It requires stepping back from the crush of modern life, taking stock of our relationships, and being honest with ourselves about where we’re devoting our time and whether we are tending to the connections that help us thrive. Finding the time for this type of reflection can be hard, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. But it can yield enormous benefits.

Many of our Harvard Study participants have told us that filling out questionnaires every two years and being interviewed regularly have given them a welcome perspective on their life and relationships. We ask them to really think about themselves and the people they love, and that process of self-reflection helps some of them.

Read: 10 practical ways to improve happiness

This is a practice that could help anyone. Looking in the mirror and thinking honestly about where your life stands is a first step in trying to live a good life. Noticing where you are can help put into relief where you would like to be. Having some reservations about this kind of self-reflection is understandable. Our study participants were not always keen on filling out our questionnaires, or eager to consider the larger picture of their life. Some would skip difficult questions or leave entire pages blank, and some would just not return certain surveys. Some even wrote comments in the margins of their questionnaires about what they thought of our requests. “What kinds of questions are these!?” is a response we received occasionally, often from participants who preferred not to think about difficulties in their life. The experiences of the people who skipped questions or entire questionnaires were also important, though—they were just as crucial in understanding adult development as the experiences of people eager to share. A lot of useful data and gems of experience were buried in the shadowed corners of their lives. We just had to go through a little extra effort to excavate them.

One of these people was a man we’ll call Sterling Ainsley. (We are using a pseudonym to protect his confidentiality as a study participant.)

Black line drawing illustration of a person inside a bubble of curly cues

S terling Ainsley was a hopeful guy. He graduated from Harvard in the 1940s and then served in World War II. After he left the service, he got a job as a scientist and retired in his 60s. When asked to describe his philosophy for getting through hard times, he said, “You try not to let life get to you. You remember your victories and take a positive attitude.”

The year was 1986. George Vaillant, the then-director of the study, was on a long interview trek, driving through the Rocky Mountains to visit the study’s participants who lived in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. Sterling had not returned the most recent survey, and there was some catching up to do. He met Vaillant at a hotel to give him a ride to the diner where Sterling wanted to do his scheduled interview. When Vaillant buckled himself into the passenger seat of Sterling’s car, the seat belt left a stripe of dust across his chest. “I was left to wonder,” he wrote, “the last time somebody had used it.”

Sterling was technically married, but his wife lived far away, and they hadn’t slept in the same room in years. They spoke only every few months.

Read: The six forces that fuel friendship

When asked why they had not gotten a divorce, he said, “I wouldn’t want to do that to the children,” even though his kids were grown and had children of their own. Sterling was proud of his kids and beamed when he spoke of them, saying they were the most important thing in his life. But he rarely saw them and seemed to prefer to keep his relationships with them thriving mostly in his imagination. Vaillant noted that Sterling seemed to be using optimism to push away some of his fears and avoid challenges in his life. Putting a positive spin on every matter and then pushing it out of his mind made it possible for him to believe that nothing was wrong, he was fine, he was happy, his kids didn’t need him.

He didn’t travel to see his son’s new home abroad, because he didn’t “want to be a burden”—even though he’d been learning a new language to prepare for the trip. He had another child who lived closer, but he hadn’t visited in more than a year. He didn’t have a relationship with his grandchildren, and he wasn’t in contact with any friends.

When asked about his older sister, Sterling seemed startled. “My sister?” he said.

Yes, the sister he had told the study so much about when he was younger.

Sterling thought about it for a long time, and then told Vaillant that it must have been decades since he last spoke with her. A frightened expression came over his face. “Would she still be living?” he said.

Sterling tried not to think about his relationships, and he was even less inclined to talk about them. This is a common experience. We don’t always know why we do things or why we don’t do things, and we may not understand what is holding us at a distance from the people in our life. Taking some time to look in the mirror can help. Sometimes there are needs inside of us that are looking for a voice, a way to get out. They might be things that we have never seen or articulated to ourselves.

This seemed to be the case with Sterling. Asked how he spent his evenings, he said he spent time with an elderly woman who lived in a nearby trailer. Each night he would walk over, and they’d watch TV and talk. Eventually she would fall asleep, and he would help her into bed and wash her dishes and close the shades before walking home. She was the closest thing he had to a confidant.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if she dies,” he said.

Listen to Robert Waldinger in conversation with Arthur Brooks and Rebecca Rashid on "How to Build a Happy Life":

L oneliness has a physical effect on the body. It can render people more sensitive to pain, suppress their immune system, diminish brain function, and disrupt sleep, which in turn can make an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Research has found that, for older adults, loneliness is far more dangerous than obesity. Ongoing loneliness raises a person’s odds of death by 26 percent in any given year. A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and self-care in young adults. This ongoing study includes more than 2,200 people born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995. When they were 18, the researchers asked them how lonely they were. Those who reported being lonelier had a greater chance of facing mental-health issues, partaking in unsafe physical-health behaviors, and coping with stress in negative ways. Add to this the fact that a tide of loneliness is flooding through modern societies, and we have a serious problem. Recent stats should make us take notice.

In a study conducted online that sampled 55,000 respondents from across the world, one out of every three people of all ages reported that they often feel lonely. Among these, the loneliest group were 16-to-24-year-olds, 40 percent of whom reported feeling lonely “often or very often.” In the U.K., the economic cost of this loneliness—because lonely people are less productive and more prone to employment turnover—is estimated at more than £2.5 billion (about $3.1 billion) annually and helped lead to the establishment of a U.K. Ministry of Loneliness.

Read: Why do we look down on lonely people?

In Japan, 32 percent of adults expected to feel lonely most of the time during 2020. In the United States, a 2019 study suggested that three out of four adults felt moderate to high levels of loneliness. As of this writing, the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which separated us from one another on a massive scale and left many feeling more isolated than ever, are still being studied.

Alleviating this epidemic of loneliness is difficult because what makes one person feel lonely might have no effect on someone else. We can’t rely entirely on easily observed indicators such as whether or not one lives alone, because loneliness is a subjective experience. One person might have a significant other and too many friends to count and yet feel lonely, while another person might live alone and have a few close contacts and yet feel very connected. The objective facts of a person’s life are not enough to explain why someone is lonely. Regardless of your race or class or gender, the feeling resides in the difference between the kind of social contact you want and the social contact you actually have.

Black line drawing of two people connected by curly line

I t never hurts —especially if you’ve been feeling low—to take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them. If you’re the scheduling type, you could make it a regular thing; perhaps every year on New Year’s Day or the morning of your birthday, take a few moments to draw up your current social universe, and consider what you’re receiving, what you’re giving, and where you would like to be in another year. You could keep your chart or relationships assessment in a special place, so you know where to look the next time you want to peek at it to see how things have changed.

If nothing else, doing this reminds us of what’s most important. Repeatedly, when the participants in our study reached old age, they would make a point to say that what they treasured most were their relationships. Sterling Ainsley himself made that point. He loved his older sister deeply—but he lost touch with her. Some of his fondest memories were of his friends—whom he never contacted. There was nothing he cared more about than his children—whom he rarely saw. From the outside it might look like he didn’t care. That was not the case. Sterling was quite emotional in his recounting of his most cherished relationships, and his reluctance to answer certain study questions was clearly connected to the pain that keeping his distance had caused him over the years. Sterling never sat down to really think about how he might conduct his relationships or what he might do to properly care for the people he loved most.

Sterling’s life reminds us of the fragility of our connections, and it echoes the lessons of science: Relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our life spans. We neglect our connections with others at our peril. Investing in our social fitness is possible each day, each week of our lives. Even small investments today in our relationships with others can create long-term ripples of well-being.

This article is adapted from Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz’s new book, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness .

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What is the World’s Longest Essay?

Typically, the term “essay” refers to a piece of writing featuring the author’s argument. However, its length can greatly vary based on academic level, nature of study, and specific requirements.

Categorizing Essays Based on Length

The One-Paragraph Essay: Often assigned for the practice of writing basics, this type ranges between 150-250 words .
The Three-Paragraph Essay: Primarily to introduce students to the essay structure of introduction, body, and conclusion, such essays typically revolve around 500 words .
The Five-Paragraph Essay: A more advanced version, it allows for three paragraphs exploring the core idea in the body. Such essays generally land around 1,000 words .

Advanced Length Essays

The Extended Essay: Predominantly assigned during bachelor’s degrees, these types of essays usually fall under 1,500, 3,000 , and 5,000 words .
The Dissertation: The final project of both bachelor’s and master’s degrees usually caps around 10,000 or 15,000 words .
The Thesis: The most extensive and complex type of essay, typically associated with doctorate students studying PhDs generally falls between 40,000 and 60,000 words .

Word Count and Page Count Relationship

Determining the number of pages for your essay depends on spacing , margins , font size , and families’ . Using standard 1-inch margins, and 12 pt. Arial font ; a 5,000-word essay will generate 10 pages single-spaced or 20 pages double-spaced .

Conclusion: Final Words

In conclusion, the length of an essay greatly varies based on many factors, notably the academic level, the subject matter, and the type of essay. Recognizing the style and length of the essay you’ve been tasked with will significantly influence your approach towards it. While quantity does maintain importance in fulfilling assigned guidelines, focus on the quality of your content should not be overshadowed. In theory, the longest form of essay could be a PhD thesis , which can reach up to 60,000 words or more.

Is the Book ‘Icebreaker’ a Notable LGBT Literature?

My internship at Bridgewater Associates felt like a 'Black Mirror' episode

Under Ray Dalio, everything was recorded and we constantly rated each other. I loved it.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daria Rose, a 27-year-old lawyer and creator who interned at Ray Dalio's hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 2017 and 2018. Her employment has been verified and the following has been edited for length and clarity.

The first time I ever watched the " Black Mirror" episode "Nosedive" — about a world in which people constantly rate one another — I thought, wait, I've worked for a place like this before .

The summer after my sophomore and junior years at Harvard University, I interned at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. Its intense culture is not for everybody . Founder Ray Dalio once said around 30% of employees quit within the first 18 months .

And while I definitely see parallels between my time at Bridgewater and that "Black Mirror" episode, I look back fondly on my time there . If I hadn't gone to law school, I 100% would've returned to work there full-time.

I was drawn to Bridgewater's tenet of meaningful work

In my sophomore year, I heard about Bridgewater from another student in a social club I was in at Harvard . She'd been recruited as an investment associate and was looking for other people interested in working there.

I did some research and was drawn to the fact that one of Bridgewater's main tenets is about meaningful work and meaningful relationships . She told me about a management associate position and helped forward my résumé.

After applying, I had to take a Myers-Briggs Personality Type test and several other screening tests . Next, we had a full-day interview at the Bridgewater campus in Westport, Connecticut.

Authenticity is a big thing at Bridgewater, so I went into the interview wanting to be completely myself.

I was first put in a room with other applicants for a moderated debate-style interview. The rest of the day was spent in multiple rounds of interviews with managers. Some were case studies — kind of similar to consulting — and others involved deep intensive questions about who I was as a person. How did you grow up? Are you an only child? How do you think this affected you? How do you think this impacts your working style on a team? What wakes you up in the morning? How do you deal with criticism?

The interviewers I had were incredibly empathetic, and our conversation felt real and vulnerable.

About a week or two later, I got a call that I got the job. When I saw my offer package — I was like, whoa, this is a lot of money — and the great perks like housing, transportation, and a signing bonus, it was really a no-brainer. I thought, I'm 100% working there.

The internship was incredibly fun

Most of the interns lived together in dorms for the summer, which was really cool and special. To help us bond, we did fun activities like group dinners, our own version of Tough Mudder , and a scavenger hunt.

Every day, we would arrive at the campus by around 8 a.m. and leave around 7 p.m. I was a management associate intern in the office of the CEO, and we did basically any special project the CEO needed. I worked on a lot of diversity initiatives , figuring out how to make Bridgewater more streamlined and accessible to employees.

Ranking each other was a big part of Bridgewater's culture

We ranked people daily using numbered " dots ," a real-time check-in of how everyone was doing.

In each meeting, we'd each have an iPad in front of us, showing a list of everyone else present. Throughout the meeting, we'd give people dots for things like humility, composure, willingness to touch a nerve, openmindedness, and assertiveness. By the end of the meeting, our whole screen would just be filled with dots — some red, some green. It could get distracting sometimes — like, who gave me a three? — but we'd try to ignore it and stay in the moment.

Because we were constantly being evaluated on what we said, people were way more conscious when speaking. Instead of talking just to talk, people tried to make their points succinct and easily understandable, or they'd get a negative dot.

This criticism wasn't just limited to peers or supervisees. We were also encouraged to give dots to our bosses, managers, and even CEOs.

Dot outcomes went onto our " baseball cards ," which had information about each employee's role and their strengths and weaknesses, to create a more vivid picture of what each of us was like.

Everything was recorded

Radical truth and radical transparency were very important at Bridgewater. Everything was recorded. If I wanted to go back and see why I got a certain dot, I could go back to the recording and listen to what I'd said. I could even look up my friends' dots and see how they were doing each day, even if I wasn't in the meeting.

One time, my friend threw her water bottle in the trash rather than recycling it. I don't know who saw her, but someone gave her a negative dot. It made me realize, wow, people really do care on a microscopic level and they're paying attention to you .

Pain + reflection = progress

Getting so much constant feedback was difficult at first. At times I was like, oh, that's harsh . It's never great to hear that you didn't do something right or that someone didn't like something you said. We had a button on our iPads that we could press whenever we felt pain, and then we'd write a reflection about the situation. The idea was that pain plus reflection equals progress .

Depending on the severity of the pain or what had happened, sometimes we'd have a diagnostic session to get to the root of the problem, such as if someone's ego got in the way of them asking for help. These sessions could sometimes be uncomfortable, but ultimately were really helpful and led to growth and better day-to-day operations.

I was really good at receiving constructive feedback and was always really high on the humility scale. I like to improve and have a growth mindset rather than taking things personally. On the days when I felt a little bit more sensitive or more emotional, I didn't want to hear the more critical feedback. But when I was able to look back at it from a less emotional standpoint, I was like, oh, okay, they had a point here .

Dalio wanted us to try to take our egos out of our work as much as possible and really look toward a higher self. From time to time, we'd have to do something called "force rankings," where we ranked our team members based on who was the most and least helpful. It never felt good to be at the bottom of that scale, which happened to me multiple times.

A lot of smart people who go to elite schools are used to being the best at everything and being on top all of the time, but that's not realistic. There are going to be days where you're super on it, and then there are days that you might not be.

At Bridgewater, there was no hiding that fact.

Gossip was not allowed

It was a no-gossip environment. We weren't allowed to talk about other people behind their backs — a huge principle was that you speak up, say it to the other person's face, dot them, and be transparent.

If you were talking about someone in the context of work, you'd have to send that tape to them afterward . When I got my full-time offer to join Bridgewater, my manager sent me the tape of them deliberating and I got to hear what they genuinely thought about me while I wasn't in the room.

I think that's really valuable, especially these days when some corporate environments involve fakeness and niceties to your face and people aren't upfront about what they actually think about you and your work.

At Bridgewater, there was none of that. It sounds counterintuitive, but the constant recordings did encourage us to be more open and put everything on the table — there's no incentive not to.

I really appreciated the candidness. Now working in law, we have so much going on sometimes that we don't necessarily get direct feedback all the time. As with most companies, feedback usually happens during an annual or semi-annual review, and sometimes by that time, it's become a bigger problem.

With the dot system at Bridgewater, if there was an issue, we'd know that day, and it'd be diagnosed that week. I miss that part about it.

The best ideas won

We were really encouraged to push back on supervisors and superiors, because one of the tenets was that we were an idea meritocracy and the best idea will rise to the top, not based on the seniority of the person who put it forth.

Because debating and disagreeing with each other was encouraged, I learned so much from my colleagues. I had my viewpoints challenged and I challenged theirs. I can't imagine another workplace like that that allows for that type of growth and honest feedback.

My experience made me who I am today

I think Bridgewater's culture might be a little bit different now, especially because Ray Dalio isn't there anymore . But I can't emphasize enough how transformative and eye-opening my experience was. It helped shape who I am today, especially how I think about feedback, work, and the relationships I have at work.

I've never worked with a more brilliant group of unique people. There were poker stars, musicians, and people who wrote comedy. We all did so many different things but were united under this Bridgewater umbrella and really brought our full selves to work and gave it our all.

The experience prepared me for life, even more than just for a corporate career. It helped me grow a thicker skin; not a lot fazes me now.

A few years after working at Bridgewater, I was on "The Bachelor." People scrutinized me and said so many mean, horrible things.

My Bridgewater experience prepared me to understand that everyone will have judgments or perceptions about you, but you don't have to take them all in. We'd always say, "It's just one dot."

One dot doesn't make up the whole picture. You're going to get thousands and thousands of dots; take that criticism for what it is.

A representative for Bridgewater Associates declined to comment.

If you experienced a uniquely demanding workplace culture and would like to share your story, email Jane Zhang at [email protected] .

Consider This from NPR

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

The Key To Happiness, According To A Decades-Long Study

Sending a text to a friend can bring a smile to your face. Now, research suggests it could also help bring long-term health benefits. guoya/Getty Images hide caption

Sending a text to a friend can bring a smile to your face. Now, research suggests it could also help bring long-term health benefits.

If you could change one thing in your life to become a happier person — like your income, a job, your relationships or your health — what would make the biggest difference? That's the question Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Robert Waldinger has been attempting to answer through decades of research. He's the director of "the world's longest-running scientific study of happiness," and he spoke with Ari Shapiro about the factor that appears to make the biggest difference in people's lives. Waldinger is a co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness . In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Lee Hale and Megan Lim. It was edited by William Troop and Christopher Intagliata. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

5 Longest Essay In The World

When it comes to writing essays, there are limits to how long they should be. However, some writers have disregarded those limits and created essays that are truly massive in length. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 5 longest essays in the world.

List of Top 5 Longest Essay In The World

These the Longest Essay In The World are

“In Search Of The Miraculous: Or, One Thing Leads To Another” By Roger Ebert

“a la recherche du temps perdu” by marcel proust, “the anatomy of melancholy” by robert burton, “moby-dick” by herman melville, “the life and opinions of tristram shandy, gentleman” by laurence sterne, top 5 longest essay in the world .

Let us now know about the above-mentioned Longest Essay In The World

The longest essay in the world is “In Search of the Miraculous: Or, One Thing Leads to Another” by Roger Ebert, the famous film critic. The essay was published in 2011 and runs a staggering 3,262 pages.

A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu By Marcel Proust

“A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” also known as “Remembrance of Things Past,” is a seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust. The entire work is considered one of the longest novels in the world, but the first volume alone, “Swann’s Way,” is over 600 pages long.

The Anatomy Of Melancholy By Robert Burton

“The Anatomy of Melancholy” is a treatise on melancholy by Robert Burton, first published in 1621. The book is divided into three major sections and contains over 1,400 pages.

“Moby-Dick” is a novel by Herman Melville, first published in 1851. The book tells the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to kill the white whale, Moby-Dick. The novel is over 600 pages long and is considered one of the greatest American novels of all time.

“The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” is a novel by Laurence Sterne, first published in 1759. The book is known for its unconventional structure and style, and it contains over 700 pages.

Visit Longests to know about longest things in the world.

What Is A 1,000-Word Essay?

A 1000-word essay is a paper written on your very own selected theme, composed in 1000 words. Usually, the quantity of pages used in a 1000-word essay is four a4 sheets, not more, so perhaps a 1000 words paper isn’t as much as you think.

What Is An Essay?

An essay is generally a short piece of writing outlining the writer’s perspective or story. It is often considered synonymous with a story or a paper or an article. Essays can be formal as well as informal. Formal essays are generally academic in nature and tackle serious topics.

Can I Write A 1000-Word Essay In 3 Hours?

How long does it take? If you’re a complete beginner, a 1000-word article should take 3 hours to 4 hours to complete.

Can I Finish A 1000-Word Essay In 2 Hours?

The writing time for a 1,000-word essay varies depending on the type of essay. You could say that it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to write most 1000-word college essays.

These essays and novels demonstrate the skill and dedication of their authors, who were able to create works of literature that are truly massive in length. While some of these works may be daunting to read, they stand as a testament to the power of language and the human imagination.

Above I Have Mentioned Every Thing About The Longest Essay In The World Including The Below Mentions Queries

The Longest Essay In The World

Longest Essay In The World Word Count

What Is The Longest Essay In The World

The Longest Essay In The World To Copy And Paste

Longest Essay Ever Written Pdf

Longest Essay Ever Written Word Count

Longest Essay About Nothing

Longest Essay Written In One Day

Longest Research Paper Ever Written

10000 Word Essay

Longest Essay In The World

What is the longest an essay can be

What is the longest essay in the world?

At 21,450 Pages, the Longest Book in the World Is Impossible to Read

Ilan Manouach’s conceptual art project weighs 37.5 pounds and measures 31.5 inches long

Daily Correspondent

Artist Ilan Manouach bound together 21,450 pages of the popular Japanese comic “One Piece” to create a sculpture that comments on the commodification of comic books. And, in doing so, he created what is believed to be the longest book ever—so long, in fact, that it is physically impossible to read.

The conceptual art project, called ONEPIECE , sold out within days of its launch earlier this month. Manouach, in collaboration with his Brussels-based nonprofit Echo Chamber and French publisher JBE Books, made 50 signed and numbered copies of the sculpture available for $1,893 (€1,900) each. Each book weighed 37.5 pounds and had a 31.5-inch spine.

Manouach created the artwork to explore the “expanded digital production belt” for comics, which have become high-value items for collectors and investors, according to his website . The fact that no one can read the book is the whole point: Manouach developed ONEPIECE “as an object of pure speculation.”

“Comics are dual objects,” he writes. “They have a use value—for readers—and an exchange value for collectors. Although these two functions are not operating along a clear-cut divide, they sometimes run opposite to each other.”

As Isaiah Colbert writes for Kotaku , the sculpture is “something to look at as you mull over the supply and demand rates of manga from online digital storefronts.”

Though the sculpture prominently bears the words “by Ilan Manouach” on the front, author and artist Eiichiro Oda is actually responsible for creating the serialized manga “One Piece,” which has appeared in the Japanese magazine Shōnen Jump each week since 1997.

The comic follows protagonist Luffy D. Monkey on his adventures as the leader of a group of pirates. By August, “One Piece” had published more than 500 million copies worldwide, breaking the Guinness World Record for the “World’s Most Published Comics Series by a Single Author,” reported Hypebeast ’s Joyce Li. With an estimated net worth of around $200 million, Oda is the richest manga creator on record. And his beloved seafaring saga is apparently nearing its end: Oda says the series is in its final stages .

Manouach apparently did not consult Oda or the manga’s publisher on the project. Keita Murano, a spokesman for Shueisha, the Japanese publisher of “One Piece,” tells the Guardian ’s David Barnett that the artwork is “not official.”

“We don’t give permission to them,” he says.

An unnamed spokesperson for JBE, the artwork’s publisher, tells the Guardian that since the sculpture is impossible to read, it does not present any copyright issues.

“This piece is about Manouach’s work around ecosystems of comics, here as a sculptor who uses online dissemination as source material, not reading copyrighted content,” the spokesperson adds.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Sarah Kuta | READ MORE

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

The 20 Longest American Movies of All Time, Ranked by Runtime

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

American movies might not be known for their lengthy runtimes the same way Bollywood films are, but since the birth of Hollywood, plenty of filmmakers have tried their hand at making epics. Anything over 2.5 hours can seem daunting to some, and then once you start wading into 3+ hour-long territory, attention spans and bladders alike can become remarkably challenged.

However, some movies need a good deal of time to successfully tell their stories, and a good many long films do ultimately earn their epic runtimes. The following titles are among the longest-ever produced wholly or partly by American studios , excluding documentaries and certain experimental films that often push runtimes to incomprehensibly large sizes. These predominantly mainstream releases are ranked below, beginning with the long and ending with the longest.

20 'Spartacus' (1960)

Runtime: 197 minutes.

Kirk Douglas reaching for a spear in Spartacus

The longest film Stanley Kubrick directed might well also be the least Kubrickian of the bunch: Spartacus , a historical epic that’s a very good film, just not quite a very good Kubrick film. As early as Paths of Glory , the filmmaker had established his own voice and style, but was brought in to work on Spartacus after the original director, Anthony Mann , was fired shortly after filming had commenced.

Still, Spartacus shows that Kubrick could well have succeeded as a director-for-hire, but the world of cinema is probably better off for the fact that post-1960, he pretty much did his own thing, with the resulting films sometimes baffling contemporary viewers before becoming appreciated years later. Spartacus does still satisfy as a grand Hollywood epic – perhaps even one of the better ones of its time – with the scope being grand and the story feeling moving .

*Availability in US

Not available

19 'It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' (1963)

Still frame of the ensemble cast of 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World'

There are various cuts of the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World , the shortest being 159 minutes and the longest being 197 minutes. No matter what cut you watch, the fact remains that It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is incredibly long for what’s essentially an absurd slapstick comedy, but it keeps the energy high throughout, and those who find its brand of humor funny will likely be entertained throughout.

The film revolves around a cross-country race to obtain a buried fortune, with countless characters all competing against each other to find this stash of cash before anyone else can. It does ultimately have a moral message by the end, but until then, it’s just a great deal of fun to watch wacky characters screwing each other over and causing massive amounts of mayhem and destruction.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

18 'intolerance: love’s struggle throughout the ages' (1916).

D.W. Griffith ’s most well-known/infamous film was 1915’s The Birth of a Nation , which was a big film for its time and was groundbreaking from a technical perspective, but it’s hard to watch nowadays on account of its age, pacing, and racist content. One year later, Griffith made another epic film that was better in just about every way, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages , which can be watched nowadays so long as one doesn’t mind movies that are more than a century old.

Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages tells various stories from different points in history, tying them all together thematically and having them link to a “main” story involving a young woman and her difficulties in life. It’s quite the mammoth achievement, and still looks impressively large-scale to this day , though you’d be forgiven if it took two or more sittings to ultimately get through the whole thing.

Intolerance

17 'doctor zhivago' (1965), runtime: 200 minutes.

Doctor Zhivago is one of David Lean ’s greatest accomplishments as a filmmaker , and without a doubt, the guy knew how to craft a compelling epic film. He was an English filmmaker, and Doctor Zhivago was admittedly a co-production between the U.S. and the UK, but that ultimately means it can still be considered an American film for current ranking purposes.

It takes place in the early 20th century, and follows the tumultuous romance between a married doctor ( Omar Sharif ) and his lover ( Julie Christie ), all while the pair – and other characters – find themselves living through a dramatic time in history, to say the least. It’s quite long and perhaps a little slow at times, but Doctor Zhivago does still manage to generally be engrossing, and it’s easy to be impressed by the overall scale of the production .

Doctor Zhivago

16 'the lord of the rings: the return of the king' (2003), runtime: 201 minutes.

Battered and bruised, the exhausted young Hobbit Frodo Baggins, played by actor Elijah Wood, stands on the precipice of Mount Doom, preparing to cast the One Ring into the fire in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Like Doctor Zhivago , The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was another co-production, this time between New Zealand and the U.S. It was the final part of the instantly iconic The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and proved to be the longest of the bunch, clocking in at just over 200 minutes (for the theatrical version) while The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were both 179 minutes each.

The Return of the King is one of the most impressive fantasy epics of all time , successfully concluding the trilogy’s story on a high note, being exceedingly emotional and filled with awe-inspiring battle sequences. It’s up there as one of the very best blockbusters not just of the 21st century so far, but of all time, and absolutely earns its huge runtime (yes, even all those ending scenes have good reason to be there).

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

15 'giant' (1956).

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor as Bick and Leslie smiling in Giant

It’s not hard to make a joke about Giant having a long runtime, what with that being the title and all. Giant is undoubtedly an epic with numerous characters spread over multiple generations , allowing the core story to span many years, but it thankfully all works surprisingly well. It’s a film that takes nearly three-and-a-half hours to get through, sure, but there’s more than enough contained within to keep it absorbing throughout.

It's a drama about family with a distinctly Western setting, and adds some romance and melodramatic elements in there for good measure. Giant is also noteworthy for being one of just three movies James Dean ever starred in, and though he’s not front-and-center here the way he is in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden , Giant might well be the film of his that gives him the most complex and interesting character to play of the three.

14 'Malcolm X' (1992)

Runtime: 202 minutes.

Denzel Washington in 'Malcolm X', looking deeply at the camera with two men behind him

Spike Lee was still a fairly young and new-on-the-scene filmmaker when he directed Malcolm X , and it’s a movie to this day that still might well stand as his most ambitious effort. It’s an intense and passionate biopic about the titular figure, looking at the influence he had as an activist and the struggles he faced, from his rise to power and popularity in the 1950s to his assassination in 1965.

Malcolm X is a lot to take in, as it covers a great deal of time and is forceful and quite in-your-face at times, as Lee’s films tend to be (usually in good ways, of course). It’s a powerful historical drama and a great biographical film , and also stands out for how amazing Denzel Washington is in the lead role ; arguably one of his best performances in a career filled with great ones.

Malcolm X (1992)

Watch on Tubi

13 'The Godfather: Part II' (1974)

Robert De Niro as young Vito Corleone standing on the street in The Godfather Part II.

Adding almost half an hour to the already lengthy runtime of the first The Godfather , The Godfather: Part II justifies going well over three hours because of how much ground it aims to cover in that time. Much of the story focuses on Michael Corleone’s downfall as the new head of the Corleone family, while various flashbacks show how his father, Vito Corleone ( Marlon Brando in the first film and Robert De Niro as the younger version of the character in this film) built said empire.

It's been well-documented by now that The Godfather: Part II is an amazing achievement as far as sequels go , and one of the very best movies that Francis Ford Coppola has ever directed. It’s another essential piece of the overall The Godfather saga, with the story ultimately being concluded by a slightly shorter (and – while maybe over-hated – not quite as good) third film in 1990.

The Godfather: Part II

12 'killers of the flower moon' (2023), runtime: 206 minutes.

Mollie (Lily Gladstone) sitting in a courtroom in Killers of the Flower Moon

While many (though perhaps not all) would agree that Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the best films of the 2020s so far , everyone would have to be in agreement that it’s up there with the decade’s longest. Martin Scorsese has directed some slightly longer movies before, but this well-acted, epic, and downbeat historical drama/Western/crime movie does prove to be a monumental watch, and a frequently distressing and bleak one, too.

Killers of the Flower Moon aims to showcase a more subtle and insidious kind of evil than many other characters from past Scorsese films may have practiced, showing the prolonged and gradual killing of a group of people done greedily in the pursuit of power and material possessions. The length emphasizes how long it was able to go on for, and how agonizing the process of finding even a limited amount of justice ended up being.

Killers of the Flower Moon

11 'exodus' (1960), runtime: 208 minutes.

Look, most of the time, when a movie finds itself allowed to run for three or more hours, it justifies such a runtime. Unfortunately, when it comes to the lengthy historical drama/war movie that is Exodus , a reason for the immense length isn’t found. As such, despite the premise sounding interesting, the cast being strong (it includes Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint ), and there being clear money behind its production, it ends up more than a little dull to watch.

Exodus is about the creation of Israel following the conclusion of World War II, centering on various conflicts that came about as a result of this event (conflicts that stretched on for decades, too). Some may dislike it for the sides it chooses to take or not take in depicting this conflict, but others will simply check out because Exodus is very long and kind of dull, even if it’s not abysmally made from a technical perspective and some of the actors are doing their best with what they were given.

Watch on Hoopla

10 'The Irishman' (2019)

Runtime: 209 minutes.

Frank Sheehan talking to someone with their back to the camera in The Irishman

Martin Scorsese is no stranger to making films with long runtimes, and neither is he a stranger to making films that are flat-out amazing. In the case of The Irishman , it’s both one of his longest and most ambitious movies to date, centering on an aging hitman who looks back on the life he’s led with remorse, particularly when it comes to his involvement in the infamous disappearance of union leader Jimmy Hoffa .

Using some admittedly inconsistent de-aging effects, The Irishman spans decades while allowing various actors to portray their characters at different stages of their lives. It’s an epic film that’s also a good deal more somber than many of the gangster movies Scorsese made earlier in his career, clocking in at just shy of 3.5 hours and telling an appropriately large-scale and devastating story in that time.

The Irishman

9 'ben-hur' (1959), runtime: 212 minutes.

A man races a chariot pulled by eight horses in Ben-Hur

Hollywood went all out with making epics in the 1950s, and into the 1960s, too (though one of the all-time greats of the genre, Lawrence of Arabia , was a UK production), likely in response to television’s popularity making the act of going to the cinema less attractive. Few Hollywood epics can claim to be as large-scale and bombastically cinematic as Ben-Hur , which is one of the largest productions of its time as well as one of the most notably long.

Spanning just over three-and-a-half hours, Ben-Hur is a gripping revenge-themed adventure/drama movie about a man sold into slavery, and the lengths he goes to while seeking revenge against the man who wronged him and his family. The spectacle of Ben-Hur is grand enough to ensure that the film’s still one that can shock and awe an audience in all the best ways, being one epic that’s aged surprisingly well.

8 'Heaven's Gate' (1980)

Runtime: 217 minutes.

Horses aplenty in a clip from 1980's 'Heaven's Gate'

Standing as one of the longest Westerns of all time , Heaven’s Gate is a film that (arguably undeservedly) lives in infamy. It was director Michael Cimino ’s follow-up to the immensely successful Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter , which was also a lengthy and challenging movie, though perhaps Heaven’s Gate pushed things too far for some. The amount of negative press surrounding Heaven's Gate likely didn’t help, either.

Heaven’s Gate aims to do a lot, even considering the amount of time it runs for. It’s broadly about a large-scale conflict between immigrants and wealth-hoarding cattle farmers, featuring a large cast of characters, many of whom have their own subplots and various other things going on. It can feel unwieldy, but the wild ambition of it all is admirable, and there are enough striking/memorable moments to make it worth watching at least once.

Heaven’s Gate (1980)

7 'the ten commandments' (1956), runtime: 220 minutes.

The Ten Commandments takes one of the best-known stories from the Bible and transforms it into a true epic, with this 1956 version also being noteworthy for marking the second time director Cecil B. DeMille made a film of this name (the first was in 1923). Broadly speaking, The Ten Commandments is an iconic religious movie that tells the story of Moses, following how he was raised by a royal family from infancy and eventually fulfilled his destiny as the leader of the Hebrew people.

Biblical stories aren’t shy about getting rather huge in scope (especially something like Noah's Ark ), so it feels fitting that The Ten Commandments is a grand production with a runtime that comes close to four hours . Its impressive size and attention to detail make it a film that’s easy to admire and get swept up in, regardless of how religious the viewer personally is.

The Ten Commandments

6 'once upon a time in america' (1984), runtime: 229 minutes.

Noodles, played by Robert De Niro, sits on a couch with the gang in Once Upon a Time in America

With Once Upon a Time in America , there’s an argument to be made that Sergio Leone saved his best – or at least most ambitious – film for last. It ended up being the legendary Italian filmmaker’s swansong; a crime epic about childhood friends who become successful gangsters in adulthood, during the Prohibition era, only for ceaseless greed and cruelty to be their collective undoing as they grow older.

With its considerable runtime and numerous sequences that are uncompromisingly violent, it’s not the easiest movie to sit through, but it will impress those who feel up to watching it. Once Upon a Time in America contains one of Robert De Niro’s best and most complex performances , and is beautifully shot from start to finish , with such visuals only looking/feeling even more impressive when contrasted with Ennio Morricone ’s remarkable and haunting score.

Once Upon a Time in America

5 'gone with the wind' (1939), runtime: 233 minutes.

A film that to this day remains historically significant and controversial, seemingly in equal measure, Gone with the Wind was arguably the biggest movie of its time , and an Oscar-winning epic that likely influenced all epics that followed in its wake. It combines melodrama, romance, and war genres into a single narrative that takes place during and after the American Civil War, predominantly focused on an explosive and tumultuous relationship.

By modern standards, Gone with the Wind can feel a bit all over the place, and its approach to exploring issues around race definitely makes the film feel like a product of its time. Yet it remains a movie that won acclaim and proved hugely successful at the box office, with it also standing to this day as one of the longest mainstream American movies ever made.

Gone With the Wind

4 'hamlet' (1996), runtime: 242 minutes.

Most film adaptations of Hamlet trim the lengthy William Shakespeare play down somewhat, though the 1996 adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh does no such thing, instead bravely telling the play’s entire story within the medium of film. Branagh also plays the titular character, and is one part of an immense cast that includes the likes of Julie Christie , Derek Jacobi , Kate Winslet , Judi Dench , Jack Lemmon , and even Robin Williams .

This take on Hamlet clocks in at just over four hours, standing as the most complete movie version of this epic and tragic tale about murder, betrayal, and revenge. It can feel like an exhausting watch at times, but given it’s the film adaptation of Hamlet that’s most true to the original text, it has immense merit and is worth checking out for anyone who likes film adaptations of Shakespeare’s works.

Watch on Roku

3 'Zack Snyder’s Justice League' (2021)

The Justice League assembled and looking ahead in Zack Snyder's Justice League - 2021

Even the most die-hard superhero fans might want to steer clear of 2017’s Justice League , which tried to do too much in too little time. 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League , on the other hand, is a compelling and better-paced film with roughly the same premise, being the first (and now only) big team-up movie of the short-lived DCEU, which began in 2013 with Man of Steel and ended in 2023 with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom .

At least Zack Snyder’s Justice League exists, in all its wild ambition and thrilling messiness, in hindsight feeling like a better finale for this cinematic universe (so long as one ignores all the epilogue-type scenes that set up movies that’ll likely never happen). With an ambitious scale, lengthy runtime, and unique music choices, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is exhausting and impressive in equal measure, and stands as a truly epic superhero movie .

Zack Snyder's Justice League

2 'kill bill: the whole bloody affair' (2006), runtime: 247 minutes.

Uma Thurman as The Bride wielding a katana in Kill Bill vol. I

Frustratingly, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is an alternate version of Quentin Tarantino ’s two-part Kill Bill saga that’s only been screened a handful of times, and is currently impossible to obtain officially. As the title suggests, it takes both volumes and merges them into one movie, purportedly being more than just Vol. 1 followed by Vol. 2 , with certain changes made to make it feel more coherent as a singular film.

As such, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair does officially exist , and has been screened occasionally before, but being able to watch it nowadays, or in the foreseeable future, feels like a pipe dream. Perhaps it wouldn’t change a great deal, and both the action-packed first volume and the more contemplative second volume can still be enjoyed by Tarantino’s fans, but it’s hard not to wish that this extended, one-volume version will one day see some sort of wider release.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 can be streamed on Netflix in the U.S.

Watch on Netflix

1 'Gettysburg' (1993)

Runtime: 254 minutes.

close up of Brig Gen John Buford (Sam Elliot) in Gettysburg

Gettysburg is an absolutely huge war film , and a remarkable achievement as far as epic movies go. It’s a movie that clocks in at well over four hours, depicting the historically significant Battle of Gettysburg on both an immensely huge scale and with a keen attention to detail, helping to demonstrate why it was one of the most important events of the American Civil War.

Viewers may be intimidated by such a runtime, and indeed, if they track down the director’s cut, they’ll be greeted with something that runs for a little over 4.5 hours. Gettysburg is a film that might well appeal more to history buffs than casual movie fans , as a result, though it’s hard to deny that as far as historical war movies go, they don’t get much bigger (or longer) than this.

NEXT: The Longest Movies of All Time, Ranked

What I Reckon
Virtual Creations
Charity Walk

The World's Longest Sentence (5237 words)

Once upon a while back there was an ambitious contortionist who made up his mind he would try to conquer the twenty-seventh highest dead volcano on Neptune, with his tongue secretly hiding behind his overweight postman's Swedish Hi-Fi set and the shoelaces of his Persian Ugh boots stubbornly caught on the corner of the round Toongabbie equestrian sports complex, while he would try to breed miniature brown cicadas inside a quickly rotating water-heater with seven silk pillowcases hanging from his uneducated vacuum cleaner which would be chained around his navel, and ask if his second grand-stepfather has heard of any orange-flavoured Portuguese atomic submarines in the neighbourhood lately that have precisely half of their crews attempting to break the 1958 record for mass voluntary electrocution whilst being sponsored by the dangerous chrysanthemum division of Interflora, who have recently gone bankrupt due to the discovery of an overcrowding of rebellious screwdrivers in the Martian stratosphere last week, when salamanders controlled nine hours forty-seven minutes of the 1978 Pakistani croquet final between the lower Philadelphia fishmonger recruiting officer and Karl Marx's younger brother Harpo, who has not seen his bedroom since the Mexican figure-skating champion booked fourteen tomatoes for exceeding the post-war speed limit and lost his balance whilst trying to hunt abominable snowmen at the Olympics with a soggy sultana hidden inside his chaperone's nightshirt which, in 1947, when John Lennon first washed his face and socks in the same country, had its only steel-plated sleeve melted off by the self-appointed chairman of Doubtful Drainpipes Destruction Company under the New Moscow Harbour Bridge which is, at present, rusting severely, due to a heavy downpour of talcum powder over at Disneyland and also due to sixteen undernourished lizards going into a deep, meditating coma without asking their mothers, who were not about to stand for this caper and sat down immediately, squashing Winston Churchill's scale model of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which was about to be tested for leakages by the Unemployed Dandelion Research Institution of Dublin, the only city in the Northern Hemisphere to have nine-tenths of its population with an I.Q. less than the average shoe size of the Australian woman, which is seven, but would be more if Neil Armstrong, the best marbles player to walk the surface of the moon, had not decided that he would accept the challenge to be the first and only man to extract his own eardrum while suffering from severe cramps in the left thumbnail, because Franklin D. Roosevelt once put on his coat inside out, which did not seem like a particularly good reason at all, but, considering the fact that the great tennis ball makers' strike of 1904 was, in fact, a fraud, he felt that he could not let the United States of America down who had already bet four buttons and a can of coconut milk on his success and hoped that he would survive the operation which had full, live television coverage by the Ethnic Ethiopians' Broadcasting Commission (E.E.B.C.) in a program with five different commercials showing how to get sperm whales with thick dandruff out of your backyard swimming pool by calling the "sperm Whales with Dandruff in the Backyard Pool Removal Service," who instantly give a free measure and quote, on the condition that the sperm whale to be removed is not suffering from gravel rash, a symptom quite often associated with Outer Mongolian malaria, the only disease in the world except, of course the 'flu, to pass the standards of the Waterloo Water Board, which were introduced six weeks ago because of the invention of shockproof, water-resistant, anti-magnetic, nuclear-explosion-proof sideburn trimmers (the greatest thing since sliced bread), and because of the remembrance of the first Anti-sliced Bread Protest March, which had to be cancelled due to a lack of support on the same afternoon as Norman Gunston's attempt to capture a smart Irishman which, while being unsuccessful, had to be satisfied by a blowfly of about the same intelligence extremely quickly, because the net profit of the experiment had to finance a joint venture between ESSO and BHP in which Norman's aunt's second husband's greengrocer's friend's hairdresser's mother-in-law was to have her false teeth removed by means of voodoo, which is at present practised only by an almost extinct race of politicians found only in the remote valley of Canberra who are trying very hard at the moment to keep the economic sky from falling on to their heads and subsequently avoid a quiet democratic dismissal by the public in a never-ending search for truth, justice and a cheap Christmas dinner which is not surrounded by enormous overheads comprising mostly of a few million dollars profit thrown in for the Artificial Christmas Turkey Company to make the industrial road smoother, and for good old Uncle P.M. in his private, mental straightjacket to tax merrily so as to have enough money to pull his head out of the clouds and his fingers out of his public image money box, which is the largest of its kind in the known world according to the latest annual survey carried out by N.A.S.A., which also showed that there has been a drop in the number of people willing to explain to their bosses why their two-week sick leave lasted nine years and why, when they are rung to be questioned about the reason for this peculiarity, the phone is always answered by a stuttering grandmother trying to persuade the inquirer into thinking there is something wrong with their telephone or that he has been dialling the wrong number for the past eight years eleven and a half months and when, after these possibilities have been overruled on the grounds that the phone was checked last year and that the inquirer has never rung a wrong number before in his life, an elderly vacuum cleaner salesman makes off with the telephone, never to be seen again by anyone alive, except his fellow vacuum cleaner salesmen, who arranged and secretly planned the whole operation without any help whatsoever from Berlin's newly elected Mayor - Mr Jerry Lewis Jnr who received this appointment because of his love of South American curry powder, since the prime ingredients are, of course, peppermint and Manhattan mushrooms, with no artificial flavouring, colouring or preservatives usually found in American suntan lotion worn by most of the population of Miami Beach, where a film appropriately named "The Fourth Return of Son of Son of Jaws XIX" (repeat) is being shot by a team of highly paid, unqualified voluntary producer/directors, who cannot really keep their greedy eyes off the admirable feminine figures that make up practically all of the film's screening time of forty-three hours sixteen and a half-minutes, except for the part where the tedious hero goes into an underwater cavern to search for lost victims of this pathetic shark, which is really half electronics, thought up simultaneously by one hundred and forty-two brigadier-generals, which may seem amazing, but is really nothing compared to the incredible twenty-three cents amassed over seventy-two years of solid devotion by eighty-six members of the Royal Philharmonic Choir in an effort unsurpassed since the year of completion (1978), when an enormous celebration was prepared that turned out to be as difficult to accomplish as dissecting an experimental nuclear warhead with a dried mosquito wing, with the complete collection of Status Quo's albums obstructing the view that is needed to perform this difficult operation, which once, and only once, was performed by the one and only John Smith, who is no relation to John Smith or the other John Smith, well known for his attempt to beat the monstrous rate of inflation by changing the price tag of every retail item in the country, which happened to be a miserable failure because the price tags were so well hidden by the shops concerned that he failed to find more than the six left exposed on the last remaining loaves of bread in the state of Queensland, which he did not buy, leaving them behind for the next seven hundred shopping-mad housewives to tear apart ferociously, trying to get as many crumbs as possible for their starving families waiting in the cars outside hoping for their darling mother's safety for the secret reason that they did not have anything else to do, as the family mother-in-law just passed away and there is a unanimously undecided decision to mourn with deep regret while celebrating joyously, with a mysterious reign of utter confusion governing the whole situation, which is also governed by the "No Small Talk Just Small Print Insurance Brokers", whose business is rapidly increasing because it has just been announced that they have insured Marty Feldman's eyes against normality for $600,000.63, an enormous sum of money, as the "600,000 dollars" part is profit for the insurance brokers, and actually only the "63c" part is the payment really made to poor old Marty, the funniest looking beetle ever to attempt to ski up a steep gravel road with no snow, no skis and his arms and legs tied behind his back since the ex-tap-dancing coach of Dizurted Island escaped from the Federal Penitentiary after serving a sentence nearly as long as this one for actually voting in a federal election, which might have been bad enough, but of course he had to go and make the whole ordeal worse by buying a bus ticket without accusing the bus driver of highway robbery or a similar offence, such as insulting the referee present at the gala day for the premier Czechoslovakian Embroidery Team who were undefeated in the season preceding the present one, where they lost only those two games because the teams they played in those games had decided to be cruel and turn up to compete with them in what is now proclaimed as being the most exciting competition sport in the known world, and special stadiums are rapidly being constructed all around the globe to cater for the millions interested in this fascinating, enthralling and totally mind-blowing spectacle being promoted by bee-sting scratching supervisors all around the world who do not want any new people joining the already overcrowded International Embroidery Association, because already multitudes of over-enthusiastic potential world champions are forgetting their life ambitions and running away to any one of the forty-add thousand clubs belonging to the I.E.A., or beginning new clubs, which is an original concept, but there are still the seventy club houses and gymnasiums being set up in Darwin alone that cannot be forgotten, but seeing that they ARE in Darwin, the club houses are therefore full of people not worth talking about, except for one drunk from (quote) "somewhere out behind that big, red rock by the name of Ayers" (unquote), who believes that the first life form on earth was a bartender, which is a slightly unusual view, but he backs up his argument by saying that the bartender must have been very successful because he had no competition in those days and who else could have begun the idea of forming the multitude of bartenders alive today which this drunk needs constantly but which Alcoholics Anonymous abhors, preferring Real Estate Agents much more, because, according to A.A., a Real Estate Agent - or rather his dog - was the first life form on earth, and that dog's master was not very successful because, although he could sell all the land he could see, he could not actually sell it to anybody, a complication which made him extremely depressed, and he started taking his frustrations out on his dog, who ran away to join a circus - or rather form a circus - because, of course, circuses had not been invented in those days, the days before the ages of watermelons, bread knives, letter openers, curtains, sunflower seeds, and thermo-nuclear disasters that wipe out entire street lights in one blast, a phenomenon which the manufacturers of the dog-repulsers surrounding the bottom of the telegraph poles involved are trying to have abolished, arid the efforts of one man, a Mr It-was-an-Accident-Sir, have contributed enormously to the success of their project which, in fact, was a failure due to the destructive influences of Mr I-Can't-Remember-My-Name Constable, who is also the proud owner of a set of twelve volumes of the International Orange Peel Preserving Encyclopaedia, which he won in a quiz show entitled "How much can you lose in thirty Seconds?", where Mr Constable lost over ninety thousand pounds, to become the night's winner of the worthless encyclopaedia idiocy, which is all a typical example of the heights to which people will go just to say that they have actually won something, even if they did lose more than they won, but nobody hears about that side of the story, except if it was somebody else's fault, which would result in the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, with a few odd lies coming out in a court of suit, very similar to a normal law court, except that in a law court where a murder case is being held, there is a general pandemonium in progress about who killed whom, and why or why not, with a geriatric judge quietly reading girlie magazines whilst some frantically emotional barrister calmly interviews a terrified witness who does not really know what happened and will not tell anyone anyway, because some queer fool of a colleague located next to this apparently brilliant barrister is repeating everything said by the latter with the utmost tedium, a factor of many which end up making the judge resentful, the barrister irritated, the opposing barrister still more irritated and a little furious, the witness not sure what the questions were about in the first place, the jury not sure about what they are doing there anyway, the audience sleepy, the government poorer, and the defendant guilty, a promising prospect for a certain potential murderer who is seriously considering making a full-time trade of depriving a human being of the right to reach senility, but there is a chance of his managing to escape the several thousand loyal policemen, several hundred self-loyal detectives, several million eager members of the general public looking for a scapegoat, several unsuccessful private detectives, and a mother-in-law who is still chasing him for injecting nitro-glycerine into her meat tenderiser in an attempt to make her stop sending him those tasteful beef casseroles which he accidentally fed to his four, once valuable, now paraplegic, German shepherds while trying in vain to remember what Dustin Hoffman gave the United Nations for Christmas in 1958, and at the same time the poor dogs were trying to imagine why their master gave them a bowl with a desk diary in it to drink with their meal and why he was wrapping up a box of water addressed to "The United Nations, c/o Everywhere", which the postman duly collected and lost in the carburettor of his new 1981 Lamborghini, that alone cost £46,000 new, but of course he did not buy this essential component new but second hand for a mere 1,410,000 Lire, because the previous owner wanted a fast sale as he was going abroad, which all goes to show, not that if postmen can afford Lamborghinis then postmen get paid too much, but that Lamborghinis are too cheap and therefore their price should treble so that only doctors, barristers, politicians and milkmen can afford them, in this way separating the rich from the poor in the community, so as a con-man would know with whose wife to become involved in a secret, close relationship lasting about $10,000, or if she really loved him then maybe about £46,000, or 1,410,000 Lire if the current rate of exchange stays stable as long as that, which is very unlikely, because the price of custom-built biorhythms is skyrocketing, due to the increased demand for them by heroin addicts and high-school teachers, who cannot cope with life by themselves, so they have to rent, buy or steal some extra biorhythms just to be able to keep themselves from having a nervous breakdown, or from shaving their legs and spleens, which a lot of them will do because their television told them to, but which a lot of them will do because their horoscope revealed to them that Venus was closer to Jupiter than that day's weather report, so that all Sagittarians would have a tremendous lift in their sex life, and that because the stars of Alpha X-74C-5, or ABCTV-2 were not in view (not counting the fact that a tree was in the way) then all Virgos would undergo a nose transplant, or twenty-four percent of all Geminis would find their true purpose in life at the bottom of a forty-foot snake pit confronted by an arm-wrestling champion, when all that is really going to happen is that astrologers are going to get richer and all the people who believe that their life depends on where a U.F.O. has decided to park are going to get poorer, but if some of them were Americans, then they could probably go on getting poorer indefinitely, seeing that the Americans, with their super-sophisticated technology, their thirty-foot long go-carts, their thirty-foot wide wallets, their air-flavoured pollution and their milkmen, have done everything except find an answer as to whether God (Amen) is communist, socialist, capitalist, democratic, or bored, whereas God (Amen) has really decided to become an independent state, not being ruled by the President (Amen) of America, and has gone to live on an island somewhere in South Andromeda, away from all the hustle and bustle of the modern bridge game, but unfortunately Mrs God (Awomen) does not like South Andromeda, as there are no shopping centres, bridge clubs, knitting needles or milkmen established in the immediate vicinity, which is almost completely occupied by one of the biggest schools in the galaxy, where Mr and Mrs God's family (Amass) can go and disrupt class just like all good little gods and goddesses, or boys and girls as well, who apparently grow up to be men and women according to the Irish National Bureau of Statistics, who have recently revealed that hordes of top scientists from that country are working on a brilliant invention that they are appropriately naming "the wheel", and they feel sure that it will be of infinite benefit to our modern-day life, according to a spokesman, who also said that they are going to sell the valuable patent rights to the Soviet Union for at least £48,000 or maybe, if they are lucky, 1,410,000 Lire, depending upon whether the Soviet Union needs the use of a wheel or two in its industry of making intercontinental ballistic missiles, international disagreements, lots of snow and not many milkmen, or depending upon whether the weather of the island of "Oh, Where on Earth am I" is going to remain at a constant tropical heat of about -68° Fahrenheit or whether the weather is going to become cold, which could lead to the beginning of another Ice Age, similar to the first one when man had only just crawled out of the primeval slime and was just beginning to wipe it all off, but he had to wait until he thought of inventing Kleenex before patiently continuing in what seemed to be a never-ending uphill battle until the invention of soap and sandpaper, which helped tremendously to clean but did not succeed in stopping the re-application of dirt by man again, and even to this day men are still trying to wash off this persistent filth in a strange ritual called a bath, performed in controlled situations called tubs under extremely high temperature absurdities by one - sometimes two, or maybe even three - persons if the World Cup final is on television, the television is in the bathroom and no one has had the intelligence to think of actually moving the television out of the bathroom so that the rest of the less intelligent bathroom inhabitants have an opportunity to get themselves into a living-room or similar room and in the end find out that the World Cup final has been cancelled and that they have to put up with two hours of solid commercials for everything under the sun except milkmen, who never advertise on television as they cannot afford to after purchasing their new Lamborghinis from a leading used car dealer in Harlem, New York, where Lamborghinis are nearly as expensive as Central Park mugger detectors, that are so expensive because the only users of them are the only inhabitants of Central Park - two squirrels and a car park - who really use the mugger detectors because they are shaped like yo-yos, so that the users can throw them into the nearest bush to see if a mugger has camped there for the night, and if one has, then the yo-yo will theoretically hit him on the head, betraying then his unique hiding place to the operator of the ingenious device which was thought up by a crack team of thirty practical jokers employed by IBICTUACITY (I Bet I Can Think Up A Crazier Idea Than You) Proprietary Limited, who are also available on an international long-playing record that is guaranteed to be the wrong size, the wrong shape and the wrong speed, so that the buyer ends up with a piece of worthless plastic that he can either burn or break, in which case he would break a world record for the most useless recording of an insane yo-yo manufacturer of Central Park, New York, an effort of which he could be proud, but for which he would get no recognition, on account of the fact that nobody on the known part of the globe would be interested in that record being broken, except a group of fanatics on records called "The Guinness Bureau of Records", who put out a best-selling book called "The Guinness Book of Records", that uses a special type of ink of very high quality in its printing to make sure that a person buying the book will be able to read it, this then giving the Book a considerable advantage over most of the other world-wide publications, which are usually illegible to the reader, even if the reader is of the same nationality as the writer, which is not very likely anyway, as writers are almost invariably the wrong nationality and speak the wrong language, a particularly difficult obstacle to overcome on the reader's behalf, except if the reader was an aardvark, which speaks every known language, strangely enough, with consistent fluency, which makes it an invaluable addition to any zoo, as the aardvark can instruct the zoo keeper as to what cage deodoriser it would like used on its cage on a certain day of the week or how many autographs it would like to sign for little girls with little grannies who visit the zoo on the condition that the proprietors of the zoo let the little granny play with the larger pythons and the exciting starfish, and the little girl play with Monty Python and the exciting stars, who are determined not to reveal to her their secrets of success or their recipe for strawberry pudding that only that one group of professional idiots are permitted to prepare, according to the Margaret Fulton's International Cookery Book edition of 1979 which has outsold "The Complete Book of Chewing Gum", which is distributed by the same people that organised the first official U.F.O.-spotting ceremony, where the person who spots the most unidentified flying objects in ten minutes wins the lucky door prize of a trip for two, one-way, to the planet of the winner's choice, where he can visit the historic origin of quite a few extra-terrestrial beings and become one of the many suckers to fail for that publicity stunt by "Acme Flying Saucer and Distant Planet Corporation" who, because they are the sole manufacturers of the incredibly intricate, sophisticated, patented garbage tin lid, and because they have claimed rights to any misapprehension arrived at by a member of the general public after seeing a shooting star or a lost reindeer in the upward vicinity of the universe, have found it very easy indeed to influence the media into thinking that there is, in fact, a thriving colony of green men of various sizes orbiting the Earth and bas been throughout the history of the gullible consumer and his parents, who are a vital element in the stability of the belief in these approximately 50%-absolute absurdities of the heavens and who will solemnly swear that they are definitely descended from - or even living with - Napoleon, George Washington and Lord Nelson, and that they have all had a close encounter of the third kind with their favourite unexplained monster from the Loch Ness, the Himalayas, and/or the forests of southern Canada, when everyone knows that all three have been captured and put into Parliament to extrapolate the fundamental laws of human existence and support the theory that man did, in fact, evolve from the Tyrannosaurus Rex and not, as previously believed, from one of the more intelligent species of tinned apricots in syrup, which is a totally ridiculous idea, as Tyrannosaurus Rexs are infinitely more brainless and therefore perfect candidates for the title of "Dinosaurian Enemy No 1", even though they never ate tinned apricots in syrup, which is probably why they became extinct and why man is still thriving, because man eats tinned apricots in syrup every now and again, so that Ardmona, SPC and the rest can consider themselves the saviours of the species, as they are all the producers of the apparently vital part of man's diet, without which man could never have survived the Second World War, according to a self-proclaimed nutritionist, who believes that the Second World War, with its day-centres for Nazi prisoners-of-war, with its various air forces testing out their own anti-enemy firework displays - on the enemy, with its couple of million disguised civilians running around in funny uniforms seeing how close to the enemy they could fire their guns or throw their hand grenades without actually killing them, all falling miserably, with its super-generals all pretending that this little folly is really a dress-rehearsal for World War Three, and with its milkmen running around looking for work, was a complete waste of time on behalf of everyone who had anything to do with creating or inventing it, because no one had permission to have fun in the 1940s from the person in charge of international sport and recreation, who apparently has just retired after a frustrating succession of almost-fatal heart attacks and several quite nasty doses of cancer, which nearly drove him to drink, but was rescued from this boredom by a team of about seven hundred thousand doctors working around the clock for nearly six months without even enough rest to have a quick glimpse of the uncut fifty-one hour version of "War and Pieces of Things that are Not Really Anything to Do with War at All", which is a less successful rendition of the epic movie, "War and Percy", which described Percy Ivegottaluvalybunchofkoconutz's escapades during the Industrial Revolution, where he was barracking for all the industrials and their allies and was fighting whatever the industrials were revolting against, which eventuated in his being put in a lovely room with cushions all over the place and a couple of heavy locks on the door, with plenty of people looking after him and, strangely enough, all wearing white coats and looking much like traditional physio-chemists except for one minor detail, and that is that they were all wearing defence mechanisms to protect themselves from many of Percy's roommates, who appeared to be absolutely mad and quite unaware of the fact that Percy happened to be quite sane and wondering why all these people clad in white had classified him in with all these other weirdos when he was really as normal and sensible as, for instance, Mr E. Rattic, the current president of "Bigots Anonymous", who organises all socials where top-class bigots from all over the world come to degrade minority groups and try to win arguments in the longest possible time with the shortest amount of cocktail breaks or police rails that inconveniently interrupt this apparently jolly good get-together of world-champion, anti-social, chauvinistic, human letdowns, and discouraging Mr Rattic from shooting the lot of them if they laugh at him - or even near him - without consulting the extremely accurate "El Cheapo Bureau of Laws" (ECBOL) to see if laughing at Mr Rattic is currently against the law, or whether it is merely illegal and punishable by being sent to an Ita Buttrose (Amen) rock concert where forced to listen to a musical version of the recipe for next week's fascinating Women's Weekly, that includes an enthralling article on what to wear to the crowning of the next King of England, and how to dig up mushrooms if they get lost as a result of a sudden shower of larger pieces of hail than a dictionary updater would be led to expect, considering of course that a normal, everyday dictionary updater has only a limited intelligence and therefore could not be expected to expect a larger-than-expected size hailstone in the next sudden shower, provided the expected blizzard was conclusively not in April, in which case the dictionary updaters would be the first, if not the only, people to be able to predict the exact weight and diameter of an average hailstone falling in the region of Kuala Lumpur or Morocco, which would not be too difficult to predict, because, as everyone knows, no hailstones fall in Malaya or North Africa (at least not during public holidays), but petrol, by the gallon, or - if most of the residents of Morocco and Malaya have already received instructions from their respective leading petrol station operators to go metric - by the litre, which results in all the petrol sinking into the ground where it lies until some fool of a firebug throws a match in Morocco's general direction so that there is an instant flame that results in the whole of Morocco becoming unbearably hot, permitting the growth of larger than expected hailstones and encouraging the growth of masochists, who really love being tortured beyond recognition and cannot stand being pampered or having a good time, preferring having a really bad time which is how they go about having a good time, which confuses them because they can have a good time only by having a bad time, and good times are totally against their principles, so they have to have a good time which they cannot do either, so most of them kill themselves, resulting in a very large death rate for masochists, nearly as high as the corresponding rate for contortionists, who do really strange things like conquering volcanoes on Neptune in outrageous positions, so as to try to keep up with the already victorious original mountain-climbing contortionist, who really sped up that challenging peak, exhausting himself to the extent that he did not even have enough energy to compile, write, edit, publish and print a record-breaking sentence, since writing sentences of absurd lengths is thoroughly exhausting and not to be tried unless in peak physical condition, since people have tried (ABC NEWS INTERRUPTS THIS SENTENCE TO REPORT THAT AN UNKNOWN CONTORTIONIST, PARTS OF WHOM IT IS BELIEVED HAVE ORIGINATED ON NEPTUNE, HAS ATTEMPTED TO SCALE A FAMOUS MOUNTAIN IN THE SAHARA WITH A GRAND PIANO TIED TO HIS ANKLE. THANK YOU).

The Longest Long Words List

websters second international dictionary

The Longest Words in English

Most English words longer than about 15-20 letters are scientific, meaningless, or highly specialized, and they tend to be formed by affixation . This is the act or process of adding affixes to a base word to produce a derivative word—in the word affixation , for instance, -ation is an affix. Here are some of the longest words.

The longest word entered in most standard English dictionaries is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis with 45 letters. Our definition is "a lung disease caused by inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust." The entry for this word can be found in our Medical Dictionary.

189,819 Letters

Yes, that number is correct. The longest string of letters used to describe something isn't technically a word—it's the chemical name for a protein, begins with methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminyl... , and continues for quite a while after that. The name has 189,819 letters, fills more than 50 pages, and takes more than three hours to say. If you've got three hours to blow, you can listen to it said here .

28, 29, and 34 Letters

There are some long words that are rarely or never used in a sentence, but instead are simply used as examples of long words, and for that reason we don’t include them in our dictionaries. The most famous of these are antidisestablishmentarianism , which has 28 letters and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious , which has 34 letters. Floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) ("the act or habit of assessing something as worthless") is another of this ilk. Our claim is not that these aren’t words, but that they aren't words that meet our criteria for entry. We explain why here .

The longest place name in the United States is possibly a lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (49 letters, or 53, if you count the Lake portion). It is also sometimes called Webster Lake. While the longer name is based on earlier names for the lake from the language of the Nipmuc people who inhabited the area, this version of the name—along with its reputed translation, "You fish on your side; I fish on my side; nobody fishes in the middle”—appears to have been the invention of a local newspaper editor.

The longest place name in the English-speaking world is thought to be a 1,001-foot-high hill in New Zealand called Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenu-akitanatahu . Similar to the lake mentioned above, this place name also has spelling variations. It comes from the Maori language and has been translated as “the place where Tamatea, the man who had big knees, the climber of mountains, the slider, the land-swallower that traveled about, played the nose flute that he had to the loved ones.” The hill is sometimes called “Taumata” for short.

Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism , another medical term, refers to a relatively mild form of pseudohypoparathyroidism (helpful). This is the only word in our dictionary with a repeating pseudo .

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine refers to a synthetic amphetamine used illicitly for its mood-enhancing and hallucinogenic properties. You may know this drug by another, shorter, name: ecstasy . Or you may know it by an even shorter name: MDMA . ( Fun fact : in the 1970's psychiatrists used it to "enhance" therapy sessions.)

23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 Letters

You can look these up if you want to, but they're long and technical so we've only put brief definitions here.

If you do something electroencephalographically (27 letters) you do it using an apparatus for recording brain waves—that is, an electroencephalograph.

Radioimmunoelectrophoresis (26 letters) refers to a kind of immunoelectrophoresis involving radioactive labels.

If you do something immunoelectrophoretically (25 letters) you do it with immunoelectrophoresis , natch.

Laryngotracheobronchitis (24 letters) refers to inflammation of the larynx, trachea, and bronchi. (Yikes.)

Hydrochlorofluorocarbon (23 letters) refers to a type of gas also helpfully known as HCFC.

Counterrevolutionaries refers to people who participate in a revolution directed toward overthrowing a government or social system established by a previous revolution.

Deinstitutionalization refers to the release of institutionalized individuals from institutional care (as in a psychiatric hospital) to care in the community, and also to the reform or modification of an institution to remove or disguise its institutional character..

Otorhinolaryngological refers to a medical specialty concerned especially with the ear, nose, and throat and related parts of the head and neck.

Incomprehensibilities refers to things that are hard to comprehend or understand. (We’re pretty sure most of these words qualify.)

Pseudohermaphroditism refers to the condition of having the gonads and karyotype of one sex and external genitalia that is of the other sex or is ambiguous.

And finally, psychoneuroimmunology refers to a branch of medicine that deals with the influence of emotional states and nervous system activities on immune function.

(Did you count only 20 words in the list? The 21st is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia , which is fear of long words. Apologies to anyone who suffers from this condition with its 36-letter name—we’re sure we’ve made it worse.)

Word of the Day

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Games & Quizzes

Play Quordle: Guess all four words in a limited number of tries. Each of your guesses must be a real 5-letter word.

Obscure & Fun

Great big list of beautiful and useless words, vol. 3, 17 of the finest words for drinking, galaxy brain: 10 words for deep thoughts, your favorite band is in the dictionary, 30 ways to tell the future, pilfer: how to play and win, 8 words with fascinating histories, it's a scorcher words for the summer heat, flower etymologies for your spring garden, 12 star wars words, grammar & usage, more words you always have to look up, the difference between 'i.e.' and 'e.g.', more commonly misspelled words, plural and possessive names: a guide, commonly misspelled words.

click here to read it now

Read this week's magazine

The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

You are a subscriber but you have not yet set up your account for premium online access. Contact customer service (see details below) to add your preferred email address and password to your account.
You forgot your password and you need to retrieve it. Click here to retrieve reset your password.
Your company has a site license, use our easy login. Enter your work email address in the Site License Portal.

"I can explain." by Kas Thomas

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The world's longest (and best) paragraph.

Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for .

The longest-living animals on Earth

The longest-living animals can survive for centuries and millennia, even pausing the aging process altogether. Here are the longest-living animals in the world.

an immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii floating on a black background

Saltwater crocodile
Seychelles giant tortoise
Red sea urchins
Bowhead whale
Rougheye rockfish
Freshwater pearl mussel
Greenland shark
Ocean quahog clam
Black coral
Glass sponge
Turritopsis dohrnii

The longest-living animals are equipped with traits to hold off, and sometimes even stop or reverse, the aging process. While humans may have an "absolute limit" of 150 years , this is just a blink of an eye compared with the centuries and millennia that some animals live through.

The true age champions live in water, often at great depths where conditions are stable and consistent. Scientists can't record the birth and death of every member of a species, so they typically estimate maximum life spans based on what is known about a species' biology. From old to oldest, here are 13 of the longest-living animals in the world today.

13. Saltwater crocodiles: 120+ years old

a close up of a saltwater crocodile with its jaws open

If they survive to adulthood, saltwater crocodiles ( Crocodylus porosus ) normally live for over 70 years. Accurate information on their maximum lifespan is largely lacking. However, records of two especially long-lived crocs suggest they can live to over 120 years.

Cassius — the world's largest captive crocodile — is believed to be up to 120 years old. He was captured in 1984 on a cattle ranch southwest of Darwin, Australia, and has been kept at the Marineland Crocodile Park on Green Island ever since. He was 16 feet, 10 inches (5.13 meters) at the time, leading experts to estimate he was between 30 and 80 years old. As of 2023, he was thought to be up to 120 years old. Cassius is also still growing, providing scientists with "serious knowledge on longevity," Toody Scott, a crocodile keeper who looks after Cassius previously told Live Science .

Related: The secrets to extreme longevity may be hiding with nuns... and jellyfish

Another long-lived saltwater crocodile is Mr Freshie, who lived between 120 and 140 years, experts estimate. The crocodile was caught in North Queensland by Steve Irwin and his father in 1970 and moved to the Australia Zoo, where he lived for 40 years until his death in 2010. He was estimated to have been around 100 when he was captured, according to the Courier Mail .

12. Seychelles giant tortoise: 190+ years old

A 2017 photo of Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise thought to be the oldest reptile living on Earth. Jonathan lives on Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Tortoises are famed for their longevity. The oldest living land animal is a 190-year-old Seychelles giant tortoise ( Aldabrachelys gigantea hololissa ) named Jonathan. The tortoise lives on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean after having been brought there by people from the Seychelles in 1882. Jonathan's age is an estimate, but a photograph of him taken between 1882 and 1886 shows he was fully mature — at least 50 years old — in the late 19th century, Live Science previously reported.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

On Jan. 12, 2022, Guinness World Records announced that Jonathan was the oldest tortoise ever. "He is a local icon, symbolic of persistence in the face of change," Joe Hollins, Jonathan's veterinarian, told Guinness World Records at the time.

Giant tortoises need to live a long time so they can breed repeatedly and produce plenty of eggs, because many of their eggs are eaten by predators. Their ability to quickly kill off damaged cells that normally deteriorate with age may help tortoises live so long , Live Science previously reported.

Related: Tiny white tortoise baby is the 'first of its kind'

11. Red sea urchins: 200 years old

View of an urchin barren at the bottom of a large underwater reef crevace in Van Damme State Park, California

Red sea urchins ( Strongylocentrotus franciscanus ) are small, round invertebrates covered in spines. They live in shallow coastal waters off North America from California to Alaska, where they feed on marine plants, according to Oregon State University . Researchers used to assume that red sea urchins grew quickly and had modest life spans of up to about 10 years, but as scientists studied the species in more detail, they realized these urchins continue to grow very slowly and, in some locations, will survive for centuries if they can avoid predators, disease and fishers.

The red sea urchins found off Washington and Alaska probably live more than 100 years, and the longest-living individuals in British Columbia, Canada, may be around 200 years old, according to a 2003 study published in the journal Fishery Bulletin .

Related: Mysterious 'blue goo' at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists

10. Bowhead whale: potentially 200+ years old

A bowhead whale breaches in waters near the Qikiqtaaluk Region in Nunavut, northern Canada.

Bowhead whales ( Balaena mysticetus ) are the longest-living mammals. The Arctic and sub-Arctic whales' exact life span is unknown, but stone harpoon tips found in some harvested individuals prove that they comfortably live over 100 years and may live more than 200 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The whales have mutations in a gene called ERCC1, which is involved with repairing damaged DNA, that may help protect the whales from cancer, a potential cause of death. Furthermore, another gene, called PCNA, has a section that has been duplicated. This gene is involved in cell growth and repair, and the duplication could slow aging, Live Science previously reported.

Studying these long-lived whales could provide hints about how to prolong human life. "My own view is that different long-lived species use different tricks to evolve long life spans, and there aren't many genes in common," João Pedro de Magalhães , an expert in aging science at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., previously told Live Science. "But you do find some common pathways, so there may be common patterns."

Related: Natural rates of aging are fixed, study suggests

9. Rougheye rockfish: 200+ years old

A rougheye rockfish (Sebastes aleutianus), also known as the blackthroat rockfish or the blacktip rockfish.

The rougheye rockfish ( Sebastes aleutianus ) is one of the longest-living fish, with a maximum life span of at least 205 years, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife . These pink or brownish fish live in the Pacific Ocean from California to Japan. They grow up to 38 inches (97 centimeters) long and eat other animals, such as shrimp and smaller fish, according to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada , an independent advisory panel that assesses the statuses of species threatened with extinction in Canada.

A 2021 study published in the journal Science looked at the genomes of 88 rockfish species, including rougheye rockfish, and found genetic calling cards for longevity, including DNA repair pathways that may help ward off cancers. A longer life span allows the rockfish to grow larger and produce more young.

Related: Is fish caught off Alaska 200 years old?

8. Freshwater pearl mussel: 250+ years old

A photo of freshwater mussels from the Margaritifera genus.

Freshwater pearl mussels ( Margaritifera margaritifera ) are bivalves that filter particles of food from the water. They live mainly in rivers and streams and can be found in Europe and North America. The oldest known freshwater pearl mussel was 280 years old, according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature . These invertebrates have long life spans thanks to their low metabolism.

Freshwater pearl mussels are an endangered species. Their population is declining due to a variety of human-related factors, including damage and changes to the river habitats they depend on, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature .

Related: Seattle mussels test positive for opioids

7. Greenland shark: 272+ years old

A Greenland shark swimming in the St. Lawrence River estuary in Canada.

Greenland sharks ( Somniosus microcephalus ) live deep in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. They can grow to be 24 feet (7.3 meters) long and have a diet that includes a variety of other animals, including fish and marine mammals such as seals, according to the St. Lawrence Shark Observatory in Canada.

A 2016 study of Greenland shark eye tissue, published in the journal Science , estimated that these sharks can have a maximum life span of at least 272 years. The biggest shark in that study was estimated to be about 392 years old, and the researchers suggested that the sharks could have been up to 512 years old , Live Science previously reported. The age estimates came with a degree of uncertainty, but even the lowest estimate of 272 years still makes these sharks the longest-living vertebrates on Earth , Julius Nielsen , a researcher at Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, previously told Live Science.

Related: 100-year-old Greenland shark that washed up on UK beach had brain infection, autopsy finds

6. Tubeworm: 300+ years old

An underwater photo of tubeworms by hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

Tube worms are invertebrates that live on the ocean floor. Bacteria in their tubes create sugars from chemicals, which they absorb as food, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Dive and Discover website. Some tube worms live around hydrothermal vents, but the longest-living species are found in colder, more stable environments called cold seeps, where chemicals spew from cracks or fissures in the seafloor, according to the Exploring Our Fluid Earth website hosted by the University of Hawaii.

A 2017 study published in the journal The Science of Nature found that Escarpia laminata , a cold-seep species of tube worm in the Gulf of Mexico, regularly lives up to 200 years, and some specimens survive for more than 300 years. Tube worms have a slow metabolism and few natural threats (such as predators), which has helped these creatures evolve such long life spans.

Related: Wonderland of iridescent worms and hydrothermal vents found off Mexican coast

5. Ocean quahog clam: 500+ years old

A photo of a quahog clam on a beach in Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Ocean quahog clams ( Arctica islandica ) inhabit the North Atlantic Ocean. This saltwater species can live even longer than the other bivalve on this list, the freshwater pearl mussel. One ocean quahog clam found off the coast of Iceland in 2006 was 507 years old, according to National Museum Wales in the U.K. The ancient clam was nicknamed Ming because it was born in 1499, when the Ming dynasty ruled China (from 1368 to 1644).

"In the colder waters surrounding Iceland the Ocean Quahog has a slower metabolism and so grows slowly and may even live for longer than 507 — scientists just haven't found an older one yet!" Anna Holmes , curator of invertebrate biodiversity (bivalves) at National Museum Wales, wrote on the museum's website in 2020.

Related: 1 billion sea creatures cooked to death in Pacific Northwest

4. Black coral: 4,000+ years old

Branching Antipatharians Black Corals - Thorn Coral (Anthozoa Antipatharia) at Hardeep Shipwreck (Suthathip). Sunken streamship from WW II bombing under water Gulf of Thailand. Indo Pacific Ocean.

Corals look like colorful, underwater rocks and plants, but they are actually made up of the exoskeletons of invertebrates called polyps. These polyps continually multiply and replace themselves by creating a genetically identical copy, which over time causes the coral exoskeleton structure to grow bigger and bigger. Corals are therefore made up of multiple identical organisms rather than being a single organism, so a coral's life span is more of a team effort.

Deep-water black corals are among the longest-living corals. Black coral specimens found off the coast of Hawaii have been radiocarbon dated to be 4,265 years old , Live Science previously reported.

Related: We finally know why Florida's coral reefs are dying, and it's not just climate change

3. Glass sponge: 10,000+ years old

Sponges are made up of colonies of animals, similar to corals, and can also live for thousands of years. Glass sponges are among the longest-living sponges on Earth. Members of this group are often found in the deep ocean and have skeletons that resemble glass, hence their name, according to NOAA .

A 2012 study published in the journal Chemical Geology estimated that a glass sponge belonging to the species Monorhaphis chuni was about 11,000 years old. Other sponge species may be able to live even longer.

Related: 300-year-old Arctic sponges feast on the corpses of their decaying, extinct neighbors

2. Turritopsis dohrnii: potentially immortal

A Turritopsis dohrnii, or immortal jellyfish

Turritopsis dohrnii is called the immortal jellyfish because it can potentially live forever. Jellyfish start life as larvae before establishing themselves on the seafloor and transforming into polyps. These polyps then produce free-swimming medusas, or jellyfish. Mature T. dohrnii are special in that they can turn back into polyps if they are physically damaged or starving, according to the American Museum of Natural History , and then later return to their jellyfish state.

The jellyfish, which are native to the Mediterranean Sea, can repeat this feat of reversing their life cycle multiple times and therefore may never die of old age under the right conditions, according to the Natural History Museum in London. T. dohrnii are tiny — less than 0.2 inch (4.5 millimeters) across — and are eaten by other animals, such as fish, or may die by other means, thus preventing them from actually achieving immortality.

Related: Thousands of jellyfish swarm near Israel, mesmerizing images reveal

1. Hydra: potentially immortal

Hydras can regenerate lost body parts — even their heads.

Hydra is a group of small invertebrates with soft bodies that slightly resemble jellyfish and, like T. dohrnii , have the potential to live forever. These invertebrates are largely made up of stem cells , which continually regenerate through duplication or cloning, so these animals don't deteriorate as they get older. They do die under natural conditions because of threats such as predators and disease, but without these external dangers, they could keep regenerating forever.

"They don't seem to age, so potentially, they are immortal ," Daniel Martínez , a biology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who discovered the hydra's lack of aging, previously told Live Science.

Related: Here's the secret to how 'immortal' hydras regrow severed heads

Originally published on Live Science Aug. 16, 2021, and republished Oct. 28, 2022.

Patrick Pester is a freelance writer and previously a staff writer at Live Science. His background is in wildlife conservation and he has worked with endangered species around the world. Patrick holds a master's degree in international journalism from Cardiff University in the U.K.

Which continent has the most animal species?

Zany polar bears and a '3-headed' giraffe star in Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards

Earth from space: Green River winds through radioactive 'labyrinth of shadows'

Most Popular

2 Space photo of the week: James Webb telescope gives the 'Pillars of Creation' a stunning 3D makeover
3 Self-healing 'living skin' can make robots more humanlike — and it looks just as creepy as you'd expect
4 No, NASA hasn't warned of an impending asteroid strike in 2038. Here's what really happened.
5 Milky Way's black hole 'exhaust vent' discovered in eerie X-ray observations
2 Newly discovered asteroid larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza will zoom between Earth and the moon on Saturday
3 2,000 years ago, a bridge in Switzerland collapsed on top of Celtic sacrifice victims, new study suggests
4 Tasselled wobbegong: The master of disguise that can eat a shark almost as big as itself
5 What causes you to get a 'stitch in your side'?

IMAGES

The Longest Essay Ever
What Is The Longest Essay Ever Written In World
What Is The Longest Essay Ever Written In World
What Is The Longest Essay Ever Written In World
What Is The Longest Essay Ever Written In World
The Longest Essay Ever

VIDEO

Longest Essay of the World by Shri Janki Prasad Inter College Kachhauna Hardoi
The LONGEST AFL PREMIERSHIP DROUGHT
The World's Longest Video Essay
world's longest chowmein
World's LONGEST LEGS!
She Has The World's Longest Name

COMMENTS

This 1,288-Word Run-On Sentence by William Faulkner Broke Records
The current record holder for the longest english sentence is Jonathan Coe for his staggering 33-page, 13,955-word sentence in The Rotter's Club, 2001. Though the record has been broken, Faulkner's legacy lives on. William Faulkner was featured in 1983 Guinness Book of World Records for this 1,288-word sentence from Absalom, Absalom!
The Longest Text Ever
The longest joke in the world is 56,554 characters long, which is about how long I'm trying to get this LTE by the end of today. So if I reach my goal today, this text will be longer than the longest joke in the world! That's pretty cool. I would also be a quarter of the way to my goal. But let's get back to finding something different to talk ...
When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of ...
The Book-Length Sentence
An 800-plus worder in Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" (1862) has sometimes (erroneously) been cited as the longest in French literature; its winding description of Louis Philippe as a ruler ...
Get ready to rock 'n' scroll: Here are the English Wikipedia's ten
And, like many countries' history articles, Poland's is split into several parts. This, the second-most recent period in Polish history, is a featured article following a successful candidacy back in 2005—and, at 17,266 words long, is the longest such article on the English Wikipedia. Discussing Poland's fling with Soviet communism ...
Longest English sentence
William Faulkner 's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) contains a sentence composed of 1,288 words (in the 1951 Random House version) [6] Jonathan Coe 's 2001 novel The Rotters' Club has a sentence with 13,955 words [6] It was inspired by Bohumil Hrabal 's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: a Czech language novel written in one long sentence.
2021-2022 Prize for the Longest College Essays
This essay, like the other two, is also optional. Applicants are given 800 words to respond just like for the second prompt. Congratulations to Tulane University for winning the 2021-2022 grand prize for longest college essays! You are permitted to use www.ivycoach.com (including the content of the Blog) for your personal, non-commercial use only.
Verse by the Yard by Izzy Grinspan
Verse by the Yard. The longest poem in the world will be written by horny robots. By Izzy Grinspan. Introduction. While long, collaborative poems have been written for generations, the coming of the Internet has allowed more people than ever to take part. With human authors now joined by spam robots, the title of the world's longest poem is up ...
180-foot bike certified as world's longest
Eight engineering enthusiasts from the Netherlands have built the world's longest bicycle. Measuring an incredible 55.16 metres (180 ft 11 in), it's around the same length as two blue whales or four double-decker buses. The previous record was set in 2020 by Bernie Ryan (Australia), whose bike measured 47.5 m (155 ft 8 in).
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world
Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
Written Into History: World's Longest Letter
When eight schools in Cumbria set out to write the World's Longest Letter during National Stationery Week 2015, they hoped to set records for their epic writing efforts. Now it's official, with the Official World Record organisation verifying the 290 metre letter as the longest letter believed to have ever been written. Written on ...
What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good
A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and self-care in young adults. This ongoing ...
Longreads Best of 2020: Essays
Longreads Best of 2020: Essays. A small sampling of standout essays published this year. by Cheri Lucas Rowlands December 18, 2020. All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad. All through December, we're featuring Longreads' Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant ...
What is the World's Longest Essay?
Advanced Length Essays. The Extended Essay: Predominantly assigned during bachelor's degrees, these types of essays usually fall under 1,500, 3,000, and 5,000 words. The Dissertation: The final project of both bachelor's and master's degrees usually caps around 10,000 or 15,000 words. The Thesis: The most extensive and complex type of essay, typically associated with doctorate students ...
Working at Bridgewater Was Like a 'Black Mirror' Episode
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daria Rose, a 27-year-old lawyer and creator who interned at Ray Dalio's hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 2017 and 2018. Her employment ...
The Key To Happiness, According To A Decades-Long Study
Waldinger is a co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of ...
5 Longest Essay In The World
List of Top 5 Longest Essay In The World. These the Longest Essay In The World are. "In Search Of The Miraculous: Or, One Thing Leads To Another" By Roger Ebert. "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" By Marcel Proust. "The Anatomy Of Melancholy" By Robert Burton. "Moby-Dick" By Herman Melville.
What Is the Longest Book in the World?
At 21,450 Pages, the Longest Book in the World Is Impossible to Read. Ilan Manouach's conceptual art project weighs 37.5 pounds and measures 31.5 inches long
20 Longest American Movies of All Time
There are various cuts of the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the shortest being 159 minutes and the longest being 197 minutes.No matter what cut you watch, the fact remains that It's a ...
The World's Longest Sentence (5237 words)
The World's Longest Sentence (5237 words) by Mark Virtue (1980, aged 15) Once upon a while back there was an ambitious contortionist who made up his mind he would try to conquer the twenty-seventh highest dead volcano on Neptune, with his tongue secretly hiding behind his overweight postman's Swedish Hi-Fi set and the shoelaces of his Persian Ugh boots stubbornly caught on the corner of the ...
The Longest Long Words List
Most English words longer than about 15-20 letters are scientific, meaningless, or highly specialized, and they tend to be formed by affixation.This is the act or process of adding affixes to a base word to produce a derivative word—in the word affixation, for instance, -ation is an affix. Here are some of the longest words.
Longest Text in The World : r/copypaste
Oh, sorry, I thought you knew I was a furry. Haha, oops. Anyway, yeah, I'm a furry, but since I'm a young furry, I can't really do as much as I would like to do in the fandom. When I'm older, I would like to have a fursuit, go to furry conventions, all that stuff. But for now I can only dream of that.
The Top 10 Essays Since 1950
Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that's the last century, by the way), we weren't restricted to ten selections. So to make my list ...
The World's Longest (and Best) Paragraph
The World's Longest (and Best) Paragraph. In May 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his friend Neal Cassady to tell him about the road-trip novel he'd just finished. In the letter, Kerouac talked of how he had typed the entire manuscript between April 2 and April 22, on a single 120-foot roll of teletype paper, single-spaced, "just rolled it through ...
The longest living animals on Earth
Cassius — the world's largest captive crocodile — is believed to be up to 120 years old. He was captured in 1984 on a cattle ranch southwest of Darwin, Australia, and has been kept at the ...
Longest Paper Ever
Longest Paper Ever. Decent Essays. 3186 Words. 13 Pages. Open Document. Mlomeister has given me a link to this site. One day I am not going to get so angry at these types of things. It's a fact of life and an age-old issue, one that is almost pointless to fight and refute because it is an incredibly emotional topic and requires a lot time and ...
Longest Essays: Examples, Topics, & Outlines
View our collection of longest essays. Find inspiration for topics, titles, outlines, & craft impactful longest papers. Read our longest papers today! ... effects of the 2004 Indian Ocean Disaster 2004 Indian Ocean Disasters Indian Ocean is the third vastest water body in the world wide, casing an average of 68.556 million km2. It is the mass ...