page_title: Longest word in English
section_title: Place names
hierarchical_section_title: Longest word in English / Notable long words / Place names
caption_attribution_description: English: Taken by Matthew Grosso
context_page_description: The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared.
  Words may be derived naturally from the language's roots or formed by coinage and construction. Additionally, comparisons are complicated because place names may be considered words, technical terms may be arbitrarily long, and the addition of suffixes and prefixes may extend the length of words to create grammatically correct but unused or novel words.
  The length of a word may also be understood in multiple ways. Most commonly, length is based on orthography and counting the number of written letters. Alternate, but less common, approaches include phonology and the number of phonemes.
context_section_description: The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is
  Tau­mata­whaka­tangi­hanga­koau­auota­matea­pokai­when­uaki­tana­tahu (57 letters), which is a hill in New Zealand. The name is in the Māori language. A longer and widely recognised version of the name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (85 letters), which appears on the signpost at the location (see the photo on this page). In Māori, the digraphs ng and wh are each treated as single letters.
  In Canada, the longest place name is Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde, a township in Ontario, at 61 letters or 68 non-space characters.
  The longest non-contrived place name in the United Kingdom which is a single non-hyphenated word is Cottonshopeburnfoot (19 letters) and the longest which is hyphenated is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe (29 characters).
  The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is Char­gogga­gogg­man­chau­ggagogg­chau­buna­gunga­maugg, a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means "Fishing Place at the Boundaries – Neutral Meeting Grounds" and is sometimes facetiously translated as "you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle". The lake is also known as Webster Lake. The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are Winchester-on-the-Severn, a town in Maryland, and Washington-on-the-Brazos, a notable place in Texas history.
  The longest official geographical name in Australia is Ma­mungku­kumpu­rang­kunt­junya. It has 26 letters and is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning "where the Devil urinates".
  In Ireland, the longest English place name at 19 letters is Newtown­mount­kennedy in County Wicklow.
caption: The sign at Tau­mata­whaka­tangi­hanga­koau­auota­matea­pokai­when­uaki­tana­tahu
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