The English Words That Really Know How to Repeat Themselves

English has some words that look like they got carried away with the copy-and-paste button. Take pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a 45-letter monster that sounds like a spelling bee gone wrong. But what happens when you challenge every letter of the alphabet to find its own record-breaker? Patrick Foote of Name Explain decided to find out, and some of the answers are downright ridiculous.

In his YouTube video, “The Word Each Letter Appears The Most In”, Foote looks at scientific terminology, place names and unusual English words to see how often one letter can repeat itself. The longer the word gets, the trickier things become. Some are tongue-twisters, others raise questions about what counts as a proper word, and a few make you wonder who came up with them in the first place.

There is a catch. Some contenders are built by stacking suffixes onto other words, while others rely on unusual place names or hyphenated expressions. Does possessionlessness count, or are we just giving the letter S an unfair advantage? And what about tittle-tattle? At some point, counting letters becomes an argument over what qualifies as a word.

The real fun begins when you start counting. Take pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. At 45 letters, it’s a mouthful with nine O’s and six C’s. The medical term for a lung disease was deliberately coined to be exceptionally long, although doctors generally use silicosis instead. It’s less a word you’d use in conversation and more a spelling test nobody asked for.

Then there’s possessionlessness, meaning the state of having no possessions. It squeezes in eight S’s. You can own absolutely nothing and still have a word that takes up plenty of space.

And don’t overlook indivisibilities, the plural of indivisibility, which describes the quality of being impossible to divide. It contains seven I’s. That’s a lot of little dots for one word.

These examples show how far repetition can go, but they aren’t a verified ranking of the words that repeat each letter the most. Foote’s video also explores unusual place names and creative word constructions, which raises a question: where do we draw the line between a record-breaking word and one that’s simply showing off?

English has a knack for making simple things complicated. Who knew counting letters could get this competitive? And if you think these words are hard to say, imagine trying to spell them from memory.