What is the longest word of Online Modern Greek?

I've been surveying the longest words of Modern Greek, thanks to a thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog. But that's not the only place long words of Modern Greek can be reported from.

I've made mention previously of Hellas-L mailing list, which is available publicly as Usenet group bit.listserv.hellas. I dropped off the list in April 2008, and the last live post seems to be from March 2008: the group's Usenet feed has now gently passed into the Internetic night, like much of Usenet itself has; and the list itself was certainly winding down when I last saw it.

But Hellas-L had a glorious history behind it. In the late '80s and early '90s, when there was no substantial Internet presence in Greece, and the Web did not yet exist, this raucous mailing list of Greeks studying and working overseas was the main presence of Greek in the Internet. Given the times, it was an exclusively Greeklish medium, with all the anarchy of competing informal romanisations. Several of the erstwhile regulars of the list, as Internet oldtimers, are now in the community around the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog—including Nikos himsef.

By the time I started archiving the list in late 1996, it was starting to lose its preeminence; but I kept archives up to October 2007. (I missed three months in 1999.) Because it was a ready corpus of Greek—albeit idiosyncratic, self-conscious, English-tinged Greek—I used it as a resource in a few papers I wrote. That has led to at least one surprise to list members egosurfing.

The list cultivated a particular linguistic culture, like internet communities do. Playful use of Greeklish to roundtrip English, for example. Because some whoreson putz Wikipedian has just deleted my own paragraph on the topic from the Greeklish page, here it is for posterity:

Not withstanding the loaded politics of Greeklish, jocular use of English, transcribed into Greek and then transliterated into Greeklish, shows how users can manipulate the use of script to ironic effect: if a user, in the middle of a Greeklish conversation, types "dis iz xarnt tou rint" for "this is hard to read" (transliterated via δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ), they are ironically distancing themselves from their code-switching to English, doubly ironic since the script is Roman but the orthography effectively Greek. (One might retort that this is aesthetically displeasing—but of course that is the point.) This artifice is particularly widespread on the Hellas mailing list.

Another particularity was a penchant for long compounds, especially during flamewars. Since we've been hunting down long words, I cranked up my grep engine, scrolled past the MIME attachments and spam email addresses, and came up with the following list from my archives of the list. Of course, these are not Aristophanes, and the compounds confirm that long words in Greek aren't that startling a thing. But several of them have linguistic interest, including where the compounding goes wrong.

Hellas-L already came up in previous discussion, with πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο, "polymath UFO Christian penis stroking lad" (35 chars). There turn out to be 13 words 40 characters or longer in the corpus, and four 50 characters or longer.

Compounds breaking apart: #1

The words are long enough though, that they're starting to break apart. Two of the thirteen words are problematic as compounds.

The first is not really a word at all, but a run-in phrase:

Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσαςγραφωσταπαλιάμου Aristeroanarxokataolwnsasgrafwstapaliamou "Leftist, Anarchist, Against Everybody, 'I-Don't-Give-A-Damn-About-You'", coined on Hellas-L by Kostas Yannakopoulos, 1997-02-04 (41 chars)

The word starts as a compound: Arister-o-anarch-o-. But then it drops in two quoted phrases, which don't belong in compounds because they're not pure stems, but inflections-and-all words: κατά όλων "against everybody" and σας γράφω στα παλιά μου [τα παπούτσια] "I write you on my old [shoes]" (common saying: I have so much contempt for you, I write your name on my old shoes' sole, so I can tread on it.)

Compounds breaking apart: #2

The second coinage is *almost* a proper compound, but goes awry with one connecting vowel:

Χανουμισσαδικομαυροφορεμενηπροσφυγομάνας Xanoumissadikomayroforemenhprosfygomanas "Harem Lady, unjustly dressed in black [= bereaved] mother of refugees", coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2000-09-18 (40 chars)

This is a reference to AEK soccer team (Athletic Union of Constantinople), reestablished in Athens by refugees from Turkey. Skevoulis combines an uncomplimentary epithet for the team, "Harem Ladies", with a complimentary: "Mother of the Refugees". Skevoulis wants to trowel on the sentimentality of "Mother of the Refugees", so he amplifies it with a word picture: the Mother of the Refugees as mournful lady in black.

Here Skevoulis runs into a problem: he is combining the participle μαυροφορέμενη "dressed in black" with the noun προσφυγομάνα "Mother of the Refugees" (both are compounds). This is not a good idea, and there are safer alternatives: μαυροφόρ-α has an inflection straight on the root, and μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα would be morphologically unexceptional. The noun μαυροφορούσ-α is another alternative: it is of course merely the ancient active feminine participle "wearing black"; but in Modern Greek the active participle is no longer productive as an adjective, so that μαυροφορούσα looks like any other feminine noun, and μαυροφορουσ-ο-προσφυγομάνα is no more exceptional than χανουμισσ- is in a compound.

But Skevoulis has used the passive participle, which is very much productive in Modern Greek. Again, you can do this in a compound, since participles correspond to adjectives; but it's a lot less usual. Because it's unusual, the participle ending -εμεν- calls attention to itself. Even if μαυροφορ-εμεν-ο- is possible in a compound, its unusualness in that context makes hearers think of the more usual context, as the ending of an inflected participle.

The thing is, -εμεν-ο- in that inflected context is masculine: μαυροφορ-εμέν-ος "man dressed in black", μαυροφορ-εμέν-η "woman dressed in black". So μαυροφορεμεν-ο-προσφυγομάνα, while supposedly a single compound, sounds like the ungrammatical phrase *μαυροφορεμένο (masc) προσφυγομάνα (fem). To patch this up, Skevoulis gives "dressed in black" the feminine ending -η. But now with μαυροφορεμεν-η-προσφυγομάνα, he's introduced an unambiguous inflection between the two stems.

That makes the compound breaks apart: participial -εμέν- cannot stick to a feminine noun in compounding. Not because it is impossible, but because the participle ending makes it unusual, and therefore calls to mind the two halves of the compound as separate words. Those separate words would disagree in gender, so the attempted compound sounds wrong. Again, had he used a more conventional first half of the compound, like μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα, he wouldn't have had to tinker with the connecting vowel.

Compounds breaking apart: #3

A third coinage just misses the 40 character limit, but is even more problematic than the previous two:

in εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει-mode in evtelamagkevteBotavikwxamavexwmeraklwsei-mode "in 'Ente la mangé de Votanik—woah, I'm feeling funky now' mode" (coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-26) (39 chars)

This refers to the pseudo-French (?) lyrics of a Rebetiko song by Spyros Zagoraios—see YouTube: "I'm the tough guy of Votaniko". The coinage follows them with the phrase ωχ αμάν, έχω μερακλώσει "ah, alas, I am in the ecstatic mood brought on by bouzouki music". (The translation above is less scrupulous.)

The whole thing is in another linguistic particularity of Hellas-L: posters signing off their posts with their name, followed by in/σε [pertinent Greek phrase]-mode. Normally the mode phrase is spaced as normal, or hyphenated:

• σε-αμάν-πια-αυτή-η-Νέα-Ορλεάνη–mode se-aman-pia-auth-h-nea-orleanh-mode "in Enough-of-New-Orleans-Already–mode" (Lida Anestidou, 1997-11-06)
  
• in–ο έρωτας κι ο βήχας δεν κρύβονται–mode in- o erwtas ki o bhxas den krybontai- mode "in 'you can't hide love or a cough'–mode" (Lamprini Thoma, 1997-11-04)
  

As the hyphens give away, the mode phrase is treated as a single unit, because the expression parodies the English use of in [single word]–mode: in sleep mode, in alert mode. I assume The Marsist has gone further, and mooshed the mode phrase together, because of the opaqueness of the song lyrics. People posting the lyrics often enough run έντε λα μαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ together as εντελαμαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ. Once he started running words together, he just kept going; after all, the mode phrase is meant to be a single unit.

What The Marsist did is not that unusual; online English often enough does that kind of thing using CamelCase, and if anything it's a surprise this is the only instance of that kind of thing I've found on Hellas-L. But just taking spaces out of a phrase doesn't turn it into a single word linguistically.

Compounds breaking apart: O RLY?

I'm being rather absolute about this "no internal morphology" rules, and—as I conceded in the discussion of γαμαοδέρνουλας—you can have a phrase turned into a single word, or stem, as a quotation. That's happened with the Forget-Me-Not flower in English; and it's happened with μη μου άπτου "Touch-Me-Not" (John 20:17) in Modern Greek, used as an indeclinable adjective to mean "aloof". (slang.gr: "Excessively sensitive, hypochondriac bothered by everything to the point of hysteria".)

I note that Sarantakos, unlike slang.gr, spells it as a single word, without spaces: μημουάπτου. It does help that the phrase is in Ancient Greek of course, so harder to take apart. And I still don't think it is useful to call εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει as a single word: it doesn't look to be intended to used anywhere μημουάπτου can, like an adjective.

That's kind of an unfair burden to impose on nonce coinages, I admit. But the rarity of CamelCase in Greek gives away the game anyway: "Votanik" is not so integrated into the word that it has the same lowercase as the rest. In fact we saw another giveaway in the word I rejected as a compound from Sarantakos' thread, Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασόπουλο. If that was a real compound, there would be no need to spell -της- with a final sigma.

(In Greek typography of yore, you would in fact find final sigma in the middle of a word, at a morpheme boundary: προςλαμβάνω = προς + λαμβάνω. I'll daresay that's not the precedent Lefteris Dikeos had in mind when he spelled his word like that.)

Compounds not as much breaking apart

Back to Hellas-L. Here's the remaining eleven compounds from the period I have access to:

οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικογεοστρατηγικές oikovomikopolitikokoivwvikogeostratngikes "economical, politicial, social and geostrategic" coined on Hellas-L by Christos Papadas, 2002-11-26 (40 chars)
οικο[νο]μικοκαταναλωτικοϋγειονομικοεργασιακοτεχνολογικό oikomikokatanalotikoygionomikoergasiakotexnologiko "economical, consumerist, sanitary, workplace and technological [paradise]", coined on Hellas-L by Pelopas@acn.gr, 2004-01-22 (53 chars)

We've seen similar coinages on Sarantakos' thread, all of them parodying the journalistic cliché of socio-politico- compounds: sonorous context-setting adjectives that don't end up saying that much.

φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα feministobiologikotourkofasistomple3imata "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications", coined on Hellas-L by Lida Anestidou, 1997-05-08 (41 chars)

A summary of the various perennial topics of flamewars on the list, that the poster is trying to avoid. The humour is in the incongruous and lengthly lumping together of the disparate topics.

ινδοκινεζοουζυμβυριανοαβοριγινοκεντριστών indokinezoouzumburianoaboriginokentristwn "Indochinese, Uzymbyrian (?) and Aboriginal-centrists" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26 (41 chars)
αφροασιατοαμερικανοαυστραλιανοανταρκτικοκεντριστές afroasiatoamerikanoaystralianoantarktikokentristes, "Afro-Asian-American-Australian-Antractican-centricists", coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26(50 chars)

Both coinages deride Afro-centrist approaches to history, by concocting absurd combinations of ethnicities as other biases. The point here once again is the length of the compound, as much as the incongruity of the ethnicities.

Νταϊφαδοσαλιαρεληδοκοσκωταδοκοκκαλιστανούς Ntaifadosaliarelhdokoskwtadokokkalistanous "Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis-istanis", coined on Hellas-L by "Asteras Amaliadas", 1998-02-11 (42 chars)

Referring to scandal-ridden presidents of soccer teams. Notice that the surnames are suffixed with -δ-, which is used in the plural of the names (Νταϊφάδ-ες, Σαλιαρέληδ-ες, Κοσκωτάδ-ες). Asteras is intending the plural proper names as a genericising description, the same way Ancient Greek used Ἀριστοφάνεις and Πλάτωνες. So, "inhabitants of a Third World country characterised by people such as Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis"

ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών PapadopouloPatakoMakarezoXouvtoIwavvidikwv "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" coined on Hellas-L by Andreas Dakanalis, 2000-11-17 (42 chars)

Reference to the leaders of the 1967–74 dictatorship. Note the English-derived CamelCase: useful for clarity of the compound, particularly as proper names are involved, but not really necessary, and not part of conventional Greek (or English) orthography: the preceding compound of proper names did without it.

ΠαρασκευοΣαββατοΚυριακοΔευτεροΤριτοΤετάρτη ParaskeuoSabbatoKyriakoDeyteroTritoTetarth "Friday–Saturday–Sunday–Monday–Tuesday–Wednesday" coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2006-02-02 (42 chars)

Expansion of Σαββατοκύριακο "Saturday–Sunday = weekend": by enumerating four more days, Skevoulis is saying he has gone to London for a six-day–long weekend. Again, this uses CamelCase.

ποντικοηρακλειωτικοownerιλιτικομπινελικωμάτων pontikohrakleiotikoownerilitikompinelikomatwn "Pontikas, Irakliotis, and Owner-ly flame wars", coined on Hellas-L by Nick Venedict Economides, 1996-12-21 (45 chars)

An example of the fluidity of Greeklish, allowing English and Greek terms to be combined relatively inobtrustively. Pontikas and Irakliotis were list personalities of yore, and Economides is harking back to the flamewars they were involved in.
Greeklish is that fluid, but Greek morphology is not. If I've understood the morphology correctly, Economides can't just drop the English [List]Owner in the compound without some sort of connective suffix: ποντικοηρακλειωτικο-owner-ο-μπινελικωμάτων, with a purely English owner root in the compound, would sound like broken Greek. So owner is nativised through the adjective derivation -ίτικ-ος "-itic", in combination (I think) with the Turkish-derived -λής -li "one characterised by", and an extra /i/ echoing -ίτικ- for good measure, to connect owner to -λ-ίτικος.
I think. Economides clearly had to attach *something* to owner to get it to fit in a Greek compound. I'm surprised he went as far as attaching something as long as the adjectival -ιλίτικο-. Then again, the point is to make a long compound.
No CamelCase here; the two proper name compounds using Camel Case are later than the two that do not, which may suggest increasing influence from English.

αναρχοκομουνιστοσυνδικαλιστοφασιστοαντιδημοκρατική, avarxokomouvistikosuvdikalistikofasistikoavtidnmokratikn, "anarcho-communist-syndicalist-fascist-antidemocratic", coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-22 (50 chars)

Parodying the only slightly less longwinded invective from the right against communists, as already seen in the preceding post: αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες, Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης.

The longest word, like, ever

So we've seen several compounds long enough, and composed of heterogeneous enough material, to strain the morphology of Modern Greek: three compounds outright collapsing, and at least one more teetering. It should still be said, most of the compounds have been in good faith linguistically: they haven't had the outright fakery of the winning entries on the Longest Word In English blog, which don't count as words by any notion of wordness. You don't just take all the spaces out of a War-And-Peace–length book and call it a word. Unless you're a prat. Or a conceptual artist, which is the same thing.

That said, the longest word of Greek I now know of, Ancient or Modern, does not fall apart, and obeys the simple rules of root compounding.

Ουγγροτουρκομογγολοϊνδιανοπερσοβουλγαροαλβανοσλαβοϊταλοφραγκο­γερμανοαγγλοϊσπανοαβαροτσιγγανοαραβοαιγυπτιακοσυριακο­ασσυριακοϊρακινο­εβραϊκο­σουηδορωσσο­σερβοκροατομουσουλμανο­βουδιστοϊεχωβαδο­μιθραϊστο­σιντοϊστοϊνδουιστο­έλληνες, Ouggrotourkomoggoloindianopersovoulgaroalvanoslavoitalofragkogermanoaggloispano-avarotsigganoaravoaiguptiakosuriakoassyriakoirakinoevraikosouhdorwssoservokroato-mousoulmanovoudistoiecwvadomi9raistosintoistoindouistoellhnes, "Hungarian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian, Persian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Slav, Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Avar, Gypsy, Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, Assyrian, Iraqi, Jewish, Swedish, Russian, Serb, Croat, Muslim, Buddhist, Jehovah's Witness, Mithraist, Shinto, Hindu Greeks" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 2001-08-18 (204 213 221 chars)
[EDIT: transcription error: I left out "Assyrian" after "Syrian", "Jewish" after Iraqi, and didn't translate "Albanian"]

Coined as an indignant retort to someone questioning the genetic continuity of Greeks: "From what I gather, you believe that we are in fact..."

This word did not break Greek morphology, the way Χανουμισσαδικο­μαυροφορεμενη­προσφυγομάνας or Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσας­γραφωσταπαλιάμου did. But even with its ASCII hyphens, it clearly broke Usenet, as you can see from the randomly interspersed spaces on the Google Groups citation linked.

… Was that it?

Two concluding remarks after all that.

Are you let down by the word that dislodged Aristophanes? Are you thinking, "any random Internet poster can chain together thirty ethnicities and creeds and beat that"? Why yes, so one can. But I already discussed as much in the end of the preceding post. There's no special genius to producing really long compounds—although as the linguistics I've gone through this post shows, it's harder than it looks. What it takes is chutzpah, and perseverance.

The other thing to note is something I also noted in the previous post: while we have a well-defined canon from antiquity, in which the Comic authors' long coinages stand out, now everyone gets to be an author, and there's much more of a sample base for long coinages. And if you look back at the Byzantine instances I gave of long words, where the corpus is already substantially widened, you'll see Hellas-L is not doing that much new. ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" is not that different from Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter". φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications" is not that different from ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes". Kaisides' melange of 29 31 ethnicities and creeds is not that different from Aristophanes' lopado-temacho-thing of 17 dishes. And "Pelopas@acn.gr" is not more obscure than "Gregory, hegumen of Oxia".

And if that's all left a sour taste in your pursuit of longest words, well, maybe it's given you some linguistic edification as well...
...Read more

What is the longest word of Modern Greek?

When I posted about the longest words of Greek, I didn't include Modern Greek, because I don't have ready access to the resources that would give me an answer. A blessing on his house (not for the first time): Nikos Sarantakos put up a post asking for suggestions from his readers. Given how arbitrary word compounding is, and how fragile the authority for words is, Nikos asked for contributions in three classes:

1. Words in dictionaries
2. Words found in texts, or derived from a word in texts
3. Made up words

Sarantakos is leaving out chemical and numerical words, "which are no fun" (που δεν έχουν γούστο).

I've promised to reproduce the results here "for the Franks" :-) , and the thread has now died down enough that I will. Remember, the longest words of pre-Modern Greek are Aristophanes' monsterpiece, 171 letters long, and then, leaving out numericals, the thunderclap word from the Magical papyri, κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα, at 50 letters. I've also cast around a couple of other online threads, but not found anything longer. To keep things manageable, I'm cutting off at 25 letters for made up words.

I do of course know that this proves little, because compounding is productive in Greek, and many other languages. In fact the WordReference.com thread on longest words discussed discounting compounds from the listing, and with good reason. I'll say more on that in a followup post, after the letdown of the actual longest word found online.

It is still significant that Greek compounds more productively in general than English say, and that words 15 letters long are not that uncommon. But Greek is not in the running with actual agglutinative languages like Inuit or Turkish; and impressionalistically, German still beats Greek for commonplace usage of very long words.

1. In a dictionary

This wasn't as rich a harvest as we expected: as I noted in comments previously, Modern Greek lexicography shy away from the literary hapax (one-off word).

• Nikos Sarantakos himself suggested κοινωνιογλωσσολογικούς (22 chars), accusative plural of κοινωνιογλωσσολογικός "sociolinguistic".
  
• The longest I could find in the ispell spelling dictionary is ηλεκτροεγκεφαλογραφήματος "of an electroencephalogram" (24 chars—better known in English as EEG)
  
• δεσοξυριβοζονουκλεϊνικό "deoxyribonucleic: DNA" (24 chars, P..Konidiaris)
  
• αλληλοεξουδετερωνόμασταν "we were neutralising each other" (25 chars, P..Konidiaris and Diver of Sinks). That verb isn't in the dictionaries, as Sarantakos notes, though αλληλοεξυπηρετούμαι "we are serviceable to each other" is in Triantafyllidis, and αλληλοσυμπληρώνομαι "complete each other" in Babiniotis, so αλληλοεξυπηρετόντουσαν "they were serviceable ...", αλληλοσυμπληρωνόντουσαν "they were completing ..." (22 chars)
  
• αρεταμαρτωλιδεοπαθοφθέγματος "of an utterance of the passion of the idea of virtue and sin (?)" (28 chars, TAK, from Anastasiadi-Symeonidi's reverse dictionary) No idea why it's in there, and noone's quite sure what it's even supposed to mean.

I'm suspicious of that last word, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up. The fact that dictionaries aren't as prepared to go there makes sense, given that Modern Greek dictionaries are all about words in actual use. Greek thinks a six-syllable word is relatively short, as we'll see further down; but ten syllables is about the limit of practicality.

Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek is more sympathetic to hapaxes, being a dictionary of a literary canon. It has three words of 26–28 letters, which I didn't include in the previous post, because they just missed the 29-letter barrier I set there:

• εκατοστοτεσσαρακοστοτέταρτον "1/144" (28 chars: the 14th century Rechenbuch [Arithmetic textbook] published by K. Vogel)
  
• ανακουρκουδοκλανομούστακος "squatting fart moustached" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course.)
  
• εντεροκαρδιοσυκωτοφλέγμονα "entrails, heart, liver, and lungs" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course bis.)

2. Made up

There were the inevitable joke non-words here, such as:

• "The longest word of Greek is whatever follows, on TV panel interviews, the phrase 'I'll just say one more word'. Said word usually lasts three to five minutes." (lots of chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• Τελειώνωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωω "I'm cumming!" (50 chars, Kostas)
  
• "With the help of some ακετυλοσαλικυλικού (acetylosalicylic) acid—an aspirin, get it?—I hope to manage to read through your posts. … I think I win: the longest word in the smallest package!!!" (18 chars, Misirlou)

More wordlike coinages, though not necessarily less jocular:

• οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικούς "economical/political/social" (29 chars, P..Konidaris)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμόσταυρος "dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross = particularly stupid individual" (25 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμοσταυρίζουμε "we say 'dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross'" (29 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• ψυχοσεξανωμαλοπορνοδιαστροφικός "psycho-sexual perverted debauched deviant" (30 chars, Nikiplos)
  
• τσαχπινομπιρμπιλογαργαλογκαβλιαροσιγανοπαπαδιά "coquettish, lively-eyed, tickling, sexy quiet–priest's-daughter [cf. stereotype of librarian]", (46 chars, Epicharmus, gradually built up over a series of comments between him and Voulagx)
  
• ιστορικοκοινωνικοοικονομικοπεριβαλλοντολογικός "historical/sociological/economical/environmental" (46 chars, Thrax Vlax and Kornilios)
  
• Αυστρογερμανοελβετογαλλοϊταλομονεγασκικός "Austrian, German, Swiss, French, Italian, Monegasque" (41 chars, Kornilios)
  
• Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασ­όπουλο "offspring of a Greek and a Former-Yugoslav-Republic-of-Macedonia-n" (58 chars, Lefteris Dikeos and Nikos Sarantakos)

The final coinage makes its point—that the name of FYROM acceptable to Greece makes for awkward morphology; but it's so awkward as to be disqualified as a real word: it is chock full of internal inflections, and accusative and genitive articles have no business inside a word.

The other coinages fit into Greek morphology just fine, and the economico-politico- coinages parody extant journalistic cliches.

3. In texts

These lists won't be exhaustive of course, but I think they're indicative.

• σκουληκομερμηγκότρυπες "worm- and ant-holes = convolutions" (23 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (6 hits on Google excluding Sarantakos' and this)
  
• υποδηματοεπιδιορθωτήριον "shoe repair shop" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos, recorded by linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis in Tripoli)
  
• οικονομικοπεριβαλλοντικούς "economical/environmental" (26 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (no Google hits, but I'll take his word for it)
  
• αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες "anarchist, brigand, communist gang members" (32 chars, Epicharmus, frequent official condemnation of the Communists during the Greek Civil war) (1 google hit)
  
• Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης "National-Liberation-Front (EAM) Bulgarian Communist gang member" (33 chars, Vermeer, ditto) (2 google hits in the plural)
  
• πανεξυπνοτετραπερατοσοφομεγαλοφυΐα "all-smart ingenious wise genius" (34 chars, Dokiskaki: "I'm sure I remember it from a comic book, but which one? Mickey Mouse? Asterix? Iznogoud?" Sarantakos put this under "made up words", but the hint of a citation makes me move it here)
  
• αλκοολικοσαταναρχαιολογικοψευτομεγαλοφυές "alcoholic satanic archaeological pseudo-ingenious" (41 chars, SOphia; translation of the book title Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch. Yes, it's German.)
  
• υπηρετομαγεροσιδεροζυμωσφουγκαροκαμαριεροκηπουροαμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής "servant, cook, ironing, baking, cleaning, chambermaid, gardener, carriage driving, secretary and linguist" (72 chars, Paliouras; a word remembered from a Karagiozis play, probably second grade primary school, 1982)

How serious are these words? Less so the longer you get of course. Linguistic polemic is one of the reasons they can get so long: Learnèd Greek liked long compounds, and people mocking them would make them exaggeratedly longer still:

• ελαδιοξιδιοαλατολαχανοκαρύκευμα "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", i.e. Greek salad (31 chars, TAK: Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, Korakistika [PDF], p. 42)
  
• εδωδιμολεσχοποικιλοβρωματοπωλείον "hall of edibles and shop selling various foodstuffs" (33 chars, TAK: Dimitrios Vyzantios, Babylonia [PDF])
  
• Τηλε-τηλεοπτικοδιαυλοεπιλογή or τηλετηλοψιοδιαυλοεπιλογή "remote televisual channel choice = TV remote control" (27, 24 chars, Diver of Sinks: blog post by Yannis Harris)

Neroulos' and Vyzantios' plays are early 19th century parodies of Greek sociolinguistics, and they target the long (and serious-minded) compounds of learnèd Greek in particular: the learnèd hero chokes on pronouncing "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", and is cured when he is forced to say the rather more vernacular λαχανοσαλάτα "lettuce salad". Though 6 syllables is a lot less than 17, λαχανοσαλάτα is still a leviathan by many languages' norms, it should be said. TAK reports there are many other such coinages in the plays; you can discover them at your leisure.

In a similar vein, Yannis Haris is satirising Vyron Polydoras learnèd construction of διαυλοεπιλογή "channel selection" for the common less Hellenic τηλεκοντρόλ "remote control". By prefixing τηλε- "remote" and τηλεοπτικο- "televisual", and then Atticising τηλεοπτικο- to τηλοψιο-, Haris is upping Polydoras' ante.

Another source of long words is tongue-twisters: yes, these are hardly intended for productive communication—and neither are the linguistic parodies above. But to be learnable, they do at least have to make sense semantically as words.

• μολυβοκοντυλοπελεκητούς "carved with a lead stylus" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos); Cypriot variant, μολυβοσι(δ)εροκαντζελλοπελετζημένη "carved with a lead and iron railing" (31 chars, Dimitris)
  
• ποτηροκαλαθοσκαρβελοσωμαρογαϊδουρολειβαδοποταμίσουμε "let's [put] the glass on the basket on the saddle post on the saddle on the donkey on the meadow on the river" (52 chars, Immortalité)

So where are we? Ten syllables seems to be the limit of a practical long word, which is why dictionaries peter out at around 20 letters length. The Greek constitution has 22,939 words, and the following word length frequencies:

1:	1416	11:	1251
2:	2211	12:	639
3:	5255	13:	239
4:	1784	14:	103
5:	1844	15:	60
6:	1678	16:	27
7:	1723	17:	4
8:	1618	18:	0
9:	1546	19:	1
10:	1538	20:	2

Once we go above that limit, words aren't practical any more, and the point of using them is almost always that they're overlong. They're satires of long (but not *that* long) learnèd coinages, or tongue-twisters, or literary flourishes—compounds so long just because the author can. The annoyance with the 72 letters of the longest word of all so far, the Karagiozis play's υπηρετο­μαγερο­σιδερο­ζυμω­σφουγκαρο­καμαριερο­κηπουρο­αμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής, is that there's no incandescent literary genius to it. We'll be even more disappointed next post, when I divulge an online coinage even longer than Aristophanes'.

But Aristophanes' genius has blinded us to what long coinages are about. Aristophanes was among the first to coin such a monster, presumably; and such coinages are artifices of the written word, they're hard to sustain in an oral medium. (Not impossible, as the tongue-twisters show.) But now that everyone is an author, everyone can coin that kind of word, should the need come up.

Aristophanes' genius with his lopado-temacho-thing wasn't that he was able to compound a 171-letter long word; that's the Greek language making it possible. His genius was that he had the chutzpah to do it. And chutzpah is not the exclusive preserve of canonical literary authors.
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What is the longest word of Sanskrit?

In the post on the longest words of Greek, I mentioned the fact that Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes' monsterpiece.

If any non-agglutinative language was going to best Greek in that regard, it would of course be Sanskrit: a language of comparable pedantry, and of much more prodigious compounding. Remember how Sir William Jones discovered it: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either". Copious alright; because of its compounding, the 1880s Monier dictionary of Sanskrit (updated version online) has 180,000 lemmata, as opposed to LSJ's ca. 120,000.

Sanskrit's very own monsterpiece comes in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba. This blog post has cost me 30 bucks, but I have bought the edition of the poem:

• Suryakanta. 1970. Varadāmbikā Pariṇaya Campū of Tirumalāmbā. Volume 79 of Chowkhamba Sanskrit studies. Varanasi: Caukhambā Saṃskṛta Sīrīj Āphis.

Tirumalamba is one of the few women writers in Sanskrit, writing in the early 16th century; the work is a Campu, a mixture of prose and verse, on the marriage of her contemporary king Achyuta Deva Raya. On the literary merits of Tirumalamba's work, I'm not competent to speak, so I won't; if anyone from Karnataka finds this and wants to chime in, they're welcome to. If you do go googling for the text, btw, look for Tirumalamba, and not Varadambika Parinaya: there are lots of little annoying spelling variations for the book title.

Our word comes in pp. 18–19, in the chapter on the Tuṇḍīra country (aka Thondaimandalam in Tamil Nadu, of which the capital is Kanchi). The chapter reads:

On the way, he passed through the Tuṇḍīra country.

The chapter takes up 130 lines of English translation.

The reason it takes up 130 lines is, "the Tuṇḍīra country" is preceded by 25 accusative adjectives, and followed by three more.

Those adjectives, in turn, take up several lines, and correspond to one or two sentences each in English. One or two LONG sentences.

The monsterpiece, which is only first among equals, is adjective #12. It's full of hyphens, so to my disappointment, I'm not going to destroy all the browsers in the world after all. I have taught myself enough Devanagari to type the word in, along with its translation and commentary.

I'm attaching a gif just in case, but after some initial confusion I think I did OK. The bad typography of the original was in fact helpful: the little gaps left between the vowels and consonants meant I could actually eyeball where the vowels were. The Unicode tables are missing one ligature of the edition (ङ्ग, which should look like a dotted ड्ग).

So, the Tuṇḍīra country is, among other things:



निरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-रयन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-फुल-तल्प-फल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुत्रक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणोय-पानोय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-करुतूरिकातिसौरथ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शोतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदोय-विमल-विलोचन-मयू-रव-रेरवापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्

nirantarāndhakāritā-digantara-kandaladamanda-sudhārasa-bindu-sāndratara-ghanāghana-vr̥nda-sandehakara-rayandamāna-makaranda-bindu-bandhuratara-mākanda-taru-phula-talpa-phalpa-mr̥dula-sikatā-jāla-jaṭila-mūla-tala-marutraka-miladalaghu-laghu-laya-kalita-ramaṇoya-pānoya-śālikā-bālikā-karāra-vinda-galantikā-galadelā-lavaṅga-pāṭala-ghanasāra-karutūrikātisauratha-medura-laghutara-madhura-śotalatara-saliladhārā-nirākariṣṇu-tadoya-vimala-vilocana-mayū-rava-reravāpasārita-pipāsāyāsa-pathika-lokān

[EDIT: restored the inherent /a/ before hyphens in the transliteration, per shreevatsa's comment. Check out his post on translating Sanskrit verse—and not just because it links here. :) ]

[UPDATE: Correction per Shreevatsa again:

निरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-स्यन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-कुल-तल्प-कल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुवक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणीय-पानीय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-कस्तूरिकातिसौरभ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शीतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदीय-विमल-विलोचन-मयूख-रेखापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्

nirantarāndhakāritā-digantara-kandaladamanda-sudhārasa-bindu-sāndratara-ghanāghana-vr̥nda-sandehakara-syandamāna-makaranda-bindu-bandhuratara-mākanda-taru-kula-talpa-kalpa-mr̥dula-sikatā-jāla-jaṭila-mūla-tala-maruvaka-miladalaghu-laghu-laya-kalita-ramaṇīya-pānīya-śālikā-bālikā-karāra-vinda-galantikā-galadelā-lavaṅga-pāṭala-ghanasāra-kastūrikātisaurabha-medura-laghutara-madhura-śītalatara-saliladhārā-nirākariṣṇu-tadīya-vimala-vilocana-mayūkha-rekhāpasārita-pipāsāyāsa-pathika-lokān]

"It was, as if celebrating 134 the (important and) great festival of the marriage of the most suitable couple of the Goddess or Fortune and the Country, encouraged by the lovely lady in the form of the orange creeper, and the house-holder, the large garden, attractive with heaps of ripe yellow fruits, charming like numerous pellets of turmeric paste 135, set off in the silver cups of the buds of (her) bright flowers. It was admirable on account of thousands of groves of the coco-nut trees, that were richly laden with fruits and were, as if the hand of the earth, raised up to bestow the desired object on Indra's heaven, (which was) longing for her (of the Tuṇḍīra country) enviable 136 fortune. In it the beauty of the parting of the hair, filled with red-lead 137, of the young woman in the form of the earth was manifested 138 by the lovely path made 139 by the pollen to be seen in between the tall and densely grown trees that marked the lower limit of the range 140 of the rippling 141 rays of the sun.

134. कन्दलत् —Lit. 'was producing'. 135. Lit. 'morsals of turmeric mud'. 136. Lit. 'longing' 'generating'. 137. This practice still exists in India. It is a sign of सुहाग (Skt. सौथाग्य), i.e. the husband being alive (or auspicious state of wifehood). 138. Lit. 'reminded'. 139. Lit. 'indicated'. 140. The trees were growing so very densely that the sun-beams could not penetrate through their branches. It seemed, as if the trees were the lower boundary of the field of activity of the rays of the sun. 141. Read वोचिक instead of विचिक.

In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls 142; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet 143 and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron 144, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers 145 (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of Andropogon muricatus 146 mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting 147 mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar."

142. Lit. 'their'; in the Skt. passage the noun बालिका has already occurred. 143. Lec. var. मधु-रस-शोतल for मधुर-शोतल. 144. पाटल also means the trumpet flower, but as a rule, saffron is the companion of camphor and musk in Sanskrit literature. 145. Galantikā means a pitcher and is so called because water flows out of it (गलत्यम्थोऽरुयाः गलन्तिका). 146. लवुलय —roots of Andropogon muricatus, commonly known as khas. Huts made of the sweet scented roots of Andropogon muricatus (khas ki taṭṭis) are a regular luxury in the summer season throughout India. 147. कन्दलत् in the fourth line goes with माकन्द-तरु in line 6. This custom of spreading cloth in front for a distinguished personage to treads upon still exists in India and is practiced on both formal and informal occasions. But now-a-days the colour of this cloth is not white but red. It starts from the entrance gate of a hall or a canopy and leads right up to the dais. पाकारि Lit. 'the enemy of Pāka', i.e. Indra.

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What are the longest words of Greek?

Everyone knows (or should know) about the longest word of Greek ever—the word that broke the title bar of Wikipedia, Aristophanes' fantastical dish of 17 ingredients at the end of the Ecclesiazusae, that lopado-temacho-thing:

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Ah. It breaks blogspot too. :-)

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιο­λιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτο­πιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Have you ever wondered what the next longest words of Greek are? No? Well, you'll find out anyway. With the necessary provisos as usual:

• I'm basing this on the word forms in the current TLG, and the lexica I have access to—LSJ, LSJ Supplement, Lampe, Trapp, Kriaras.
  
• This doesn't prove much of anything, since the point is that Greek compounding is agglutinative and productive, so you can keep stringing words up. We're just happening to go through the long words turning up in Ancient and Mediaeval Greek literature.
  
• Do not even think of coming away with the impression that Greek literature makes the longest words in the world—although few if any seem to get anywhere near Aristophanes' monster. The Guinness Book of Records did unearth a word in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba in Sanskrit adding up to 428 letters in Roman transliteration. I can't find it (I think this is the Google Books snippet); which is a shame, I wanted to break Blogspot some more...
  
• For other languages, have a Facebook thread and a Wikipedia laundry list.
  
• I'm sure there's plenty of compounding happening in Modern Greek; I cited in the Quadrupeds (p. 150) the Hellas-L coinage πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο "polymath UFO Christian penis-stroking lad" (35 chars), which maker poster Constantine Thomas coiner of the sixth longest real Greek word I know of. That… doesn't prove that much either.

What it shows is, there was a Byzantine fad for long compounds, in a couple of genres, though possibly ultimately indebted to Aristophanes; and Aristophanes himself went there more than once.

I'm going to count down the top 40-odd words in length I can find, down to a length of 29 characters, and I'll give their dictionary definitions (where available) and who has used them.

The longest words in English, long enough to be cheating, are protein names. The longest words in Greek outside of Aristophanes, long enough to be cheating, are fractions. They're so boring, dictionaries don't bother to list them at all. So I'm putting them separately:

1. τριακοντατρισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεπτακοσιοστοεβδομηκοστόεκτα (56 chars), "1/331776", Scholia on Diophantus, 135
   
2. μυριοστοεπτακισχιλιοστοπεντακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπεμπτα (54 chars), Trapp: "1/17545", Nicholas Artabasdos "Rhabdas", Letters 34.
   
3. μυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπρωτα (52 chars), Trapp: "1/14641", Scholia on Diophantus, 128
   
4. τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστοπρώτων (47 chars), τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστόπρωτα (46 chars), "1/130321", Scholia on Diophantus, 130
   
5. τετρακισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοεξκαιδέκατον (47 chars), "1/41616", Isaac Argyrus, Περὶ εὑρέσεως τῶν τετραγωνικῶν πλευρῶν τῶν μὴ ῥητῶν τετραγώνων ἀριθμῶν, p. 23
   
6. τετρακισμυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοοκτακοσιοστόν (45 chars), "1/44800", John Pediasimus (aka John Galenus), Geometry p. 19
   
7. τρισχιλιοστοδιακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοέννατον (42 chars), "1/3249", Scholia on Diophantus 140
   
8. δισμυριοστοδισχιλιοστοτετρακοσιοστόν (36 chars), "1/22400", John Pediasimus, Geometry p. 19
   
9. ὀκτακισχιλιοστοεκατοστοεικοστόγδοον (35 chars), "1/8128", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
   
10. ἐννεακαιεικοσικαιεπτακοσιοπλασιάκις (35 chars), LSJ: "seven-hundred-and-twenty-nine times", Plato, Republic 587e.
    
11. τετταρακοντακαιπεντακισχιλιοστόν (32 chars), LSJ: "forty-five thousandth" (or: 1/5040), Plato, Laws 877d
    
12. τετρακισχιλιοστοεξηκοστοτέταρτον (32 chars), "1/4064", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
    
13. ἐπιτετρακοσιοστοκαιτεσσαρακοστῷ (31 chars), "ratio of 441:440", George Pachymeres, Quadrivium 2.45
    
14. χιλιοκτακοσιογδοηκονταπλασίονα (30 chars), LSJ: "eighteen hundred and eighty times as great", Theon of Smyrna De utilitate mathematicae p. 197, citing Hipparchus
    
15. τετρακισχιλιοστοενενηκοστόεκτα (30 chars), "1/4096", Scholia on Diophantus 138
    
16. διακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοτρίτοις (30 chars), Trapp: "1/243", Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. 2 p. 180

And now, the "real" words. Words not (yet) in the TLG are asterisked.

1. κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα (50 chars), (Luis Muñoz Delgado, Léxico de Magia y Religiòn en los Papiros Mágicos Griegos, 2001) "making great noise with a thunderclap, bounded by the sky, shining rays in the cosmos, and giver of wealth", Magical Papyri 12. The magical papyri have even longer strings of nonsense characters, but this really does count as a word. It's worth taking it apart:
   
   • κεραυνο "thunder"
   • μεγα "big"
   • κλονο "turmoil"
   • ζην "Zeus"
   • περατο "boundary"
   • κοσμο "cosmos"
   • λαμπρο "shining"
   • βελο "ray"
   • πλουτο "wealth"
   • δότα "giver"
   It's positively Sanskrit...
   
2. *ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (47 chars), Trapp: "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes", Codices graeci Chisiani e Borgiani (ed. P. Franchi de' Cavalieri), 124; Bibliotheca Coisliana (ed. Montfaucon), 59. What astonishes me is that someone chose to use this word a second time…
   
   • ἀκτινο "ray"
   • χρυσο "gold"
   • φαιδρο "beaming"
   • βροντο "thunder"
   • λαμπρο "bright"
   • φεγγο "shining"
   • φωτο "light"
   • στόλιστος "dressed"
3. *Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται (38 chars), Trapp: "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter", Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia (ed. P. Allen & B. Neil) 223,378. (Hey, I know them! And the "Heracleus" is in brackets, so some scribe may have decided five leaders were already enough.)
   
4. *παναξιοκτηνοπτηναστροφωστηροκοσμοποιία (38 chars), Trapp: "quite worthy creation of animals, birds, stars, celestial bodies and the world", Dioscorus of Aphrodito (ed. Fournier), 40,6
   
5. ὀρθροφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (33 chars), LSJ: "early-prowling base-informing sad-litigious plaguy", Aristophanes Wasps 505. Misquoted by Suda (omicron 581, epsilon iota 68) as ὀρθοφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (32 chars), "upright-prowling..."
   
6. ἀστραποβροντοχαλαζορειθροδαμάστου (33 chars), Lampe: "overcome by lightning, thunder, hail, and flood", Basil of Caesarea, Letters 365
   
7. στρογγυλοφιλοσοφογραμματογράφου (31 chars), (not yet in a dictionary) "writer of round philosophical letters", Theodore II Ducas Lascaris, 218 Letters, 128.
   
8. σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανοπώλιδες (31 chars), LSJ: "green-grocery-market-woman", Aristophanes Lysistrata 457
   
9. *πανυπερπρωτοπανσεβαστοϋπέρτατος (31 chars), Trapp: "above all else and first of all, most highly honoured", Gregory hegumen of Oxia 225,126.
   
10. Βρυσωνοθρασυμαχειοληψικερμάτων (30 chars), LSJ: "taking coin like Bryso and Thrasymachus", Ephippus of Athens fr. 14 Kock, cited in Athenaeus 11.120
    
11. ἀκτινολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (30 chars), Trapp: "sparkling with shining light beams", Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopoleos, May 9 section 2
    
12. τοξαισελαιοξανθεπιπαγκαπύρωτος (30 chars), "bow-???-oil-blond-on-all-airdried" (ref. to a kind of cake), Philoxenus of Cythera fr. e, cited in Athenaeus 14.50; the edition of Philoxenus by Page marks the word as corrupt
    
13. κομπορηματοχρηματομετεωροφέναξ (30 chars), Trapp: "boasting cheat puffed up with words and treasures", John Tzetzes, Letters 4 p. 6
    
14. *πανσεβαστοκοσμοποθοπροσκύνητος (30 chars), Trapp: "highly honored and welcomed by the world with longing", Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Graecorum (ed. Beniševič), I 332
    
15. ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονον (29 chars), Lampe: "uncreated fellow worker sharing the throne", Gregory Pardus, Exegesis in canonem iambicum de festo die Spiritus Sancti, 25; ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονε (28 chars), Vita of Nicephorus the Doctor 22.
    
16. σκοροδοπανδοκευτριαρτοπώλιδες (29 chars), LSJ: "garlic-bread-selling hostess", Aristophanes Lysistrata 458
    
17. λογαριαστοπνευματικοοικονόμος (29 chars), Trapp: "invoice controller and religious manager", John Apocaucus, Letters (ed. Bees) 60

Special separate mention goes to Constantine of Rhodes, who wrote a couple of pages of train-carriage–length epithets; I have cited an excerpt elsewhere:

1. *πρεσβευτοκερδοσυγχυτοσπονδοφθόρος (33 chars), Trapp: "who interferes with the profits of intermediaries and destroys contracts", Constantine of Rhodes (ed. Matranga), 625,25.
   
2. *πλαστιγγοζυγοκαμπανοσφαιρωστάτης (32 chars), Trapp: "one who sets the round weight on the steelyard balance with the gold bearing scales and balance beam", ibid. 624,8.
   
3. *βαρβιτοναβλοπλινθοκυμβαλοκτύπος (31 chars), Trapp: "playing the barbiton, the nabla, the plinthos (hydraulic organ?), and the cymbals", ibid. 625,21.
   
4. *Ἑλληνοθρησοχριστοβλασφημότροπος (31 chars), Trapp: "a character who worshiped the pagan and sinned against Christ", ibid. 624,15.
   
5. *κασαλβοπορνομαχλοπρωκτεπεμβάτης (31 chars), Trapp: "one who mounts the arses of whores, prostitutes and courtesans", ibid. 624,11.
   
6. *λακτεντοχοιροκριοβουτραγοσφάγος (31 chars), Trapp: "butcher of piglets, pigs, sheep, cattle, and goats", ibid. 624,7.
   
7. *ὀλεθριοβιβλοφαλσογραμματοφθόρος (31 chars), Trapp: "ruinous counterfitter of books and destroyer of writing", ibid., 624,12.
   
8. *λαρυγγογλασκοξεστοχανδοεκπότης (30 chars), Trapp: "one who gulps down bottles and glasses with an open throat", ibid. 624,10.
   
9. *κορνουτοπαρθενοτριβοψυχοφθόρος (30 chars), Trapp: "horned abuser of virgins and destroyer of souls",ibid. 624,10.
   
10. *ἀλλαντοχορδοκοιλιεντεροπλύτης (29 chars), Trapp: "washer of entrails [sausage, intestines, bellies, entrails]", ibid., 624,5.
    
11. *κλεπτοτυμβονυκτεροσκοτεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who operates in the dark of night as a grave robber", ibid. 626,25.
    
12. *μοιχοπαιδοδουλοσκανδαλεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who arouses a scandal through lewdness with underage slaves", ibid. 625,24.

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