World’s Longest Word Has 189,819 Letters, Takes 3.5 Hours to Pronounce

The full chemical name of the world’s largest known protein has 189,819 letters and is considered the longest word in any language. If you’re one of those people who loves to watch paint dry, you can even watch a 3.5-hour video of a guy pronouncing the whole name.

Titin, also known as connectin, is a giant protein composed of 244 individually folded protein domains connected by unstructured peptide sequences. Also, the gene for titin contains the largest number of exons (363) discovered in any single gene. Titin is important in the contraction of striated muscle tissues, but it’s mostly known for its technical name, which is sometimes referred to as the longest known word in any language. The name “titin” is derived from the Greek “titan” (a giant deity, anything of great size), but it’s the full chemical name that really does it justice. I could just paste it in this post, but it would take you forever just to scroll through it, so I’m just going to say it starts with  methionyl and ends …isoleucine. You can fill in the middle part yourself. But if you’re really curious to hear someone pronounce the world’s longest word, there’s a boring cool video of some Russian-sounding guy who takes around 3.5 hours to go through all the letters, and even grows a beard in the process. After a while, it all starts to sound like mumbling, but you have to admire the poor guy for his effort.

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Artist Uses Recurring Words to Create Detailed Portraits

Vietnamese-born photographer and artist Huy Lam uses tiny 4 point type recurring words and phrases to create beautiful portraits of modern and historical icons.

The Toronto-based artist has always been fascinated with the concept of perception, and the way we form opinions based on what we perceive as real.  At a glance, his works look like they’ve been painted or drawn with pencil or charcoal, but as you approach them further, you realize they’re made with an entirely different medium – differently colored words.  Through his art, Huy Lam tries to convey the concept of perception, but he also hopes that these images created with words “will provoke thought, discussion and even laughter.” But the hours he spends actually placing thousands of 4 point type words in just the right spots to create detailed portraits is no laughing matter.

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Juan Osborne’s Pictures Really Are Worth a Thousand Words

It’s said a picture is worth a thousand words and in the case of Spanish amateur artist Juan Osborne that is literally how things stand. Using several hundred thousand words he manages to recreate famous images and icons that have put their mark on the world.

Osborne searches for the most popular words associated with his subjects, then uses his netbook and a custom software to piece them together and recreate the image. “Words are powerful, they go straight into the human mind and really add something to my pictures that you can’t get from a regular picture taken with a camera. Mine have stories behind them that can be read, which is pretty unique,” the artist says about his works.

People usually think he’s kidding when he tells them he only uses a netbook uses a software he created himself to make the images, but to Juan it seems only natural. He feels free without the need to use commercially available software and if he needs something extra he can just create another application. While adding over 200,000 words to a single image is pretty time-consuming, the young artist says he has been doing it for so long that his skills have improved to the point where he can complete an artwork in just a few days time.

The biggest work Juan Osborne has completed so far contained 500,000 words, but he plans to beat that record and reach the 1 million mark. The only problem he faces is finding a place to print an image that big.

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