There have been several claims for the 'longest sentence in the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
' revolving around the longest printed sentence.
Sentences can be made arbitrarily long in various ways. One method is successive iterations, such as
"Someone thinks that someone thinks that someone thinks that someone thinks that...,"
or by combining shorter
clause
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...
s. Sentences can also be extended by
recursively embedding clauses one into another, such as
:"The mouse ran away."
:"The mouse that the cat hit ran away."
:...
This also highlights the difference between
linguistic performance and
linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded.
As a result, one
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
textbook concludes that, in theory, "there is no longest English sentence."
Exceptionally long sentences in print
* ''
An Accommodating Advertisement and an Awkward Accident'', the 427-word winning entry in ''
Tit-Bits'' Magazine's Christmas 1884 competition for "the longest sensible sentence, every word of which begins with the same letter".
*Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
novel ''
Ulysses
Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature.
Ulysses may also refer to:
People
* Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name
Places in the United States
* Ulysses, Kansas
* Ulysse ...
'' (1922) contains a sentence of 3,687 words
[
*]William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...
's '' Absalom, Absalom!'' (1936) contains a sentence composed of 1,288 words (in the 1951 Random House version)[
*]Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe (; born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, '' What a ...
's 2001 novel '' The Rotters' Club'' has a sentence with 13,955 words It was inspired by Bohumil Hrabal
Bohumil Hrabal (; 28 March 1914 – 3 February 1997) was a Czech writer, often named among the best Czech writers of the 20th century.
Early life
Hrabal was born in Židenice (suburb of Brno) on 28 March 1914, in what was then the province ...
's ''Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
''Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age'' ( cs, Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) is a 1964 novel by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. It tells the story of a man who recounts various events from his past, and in particular his love lif ...
'': a Czech language
Czech (; Czech ), historically also Bohemian (; ''lingua Bohemica'' in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Re ...
novel written in one long sentence.
* '' Solar Bones'' by Mike McCormack is written as one sentence It won the 2016 Goldsmith's prize for experimental fiction, was longlisted for the Booker in 2017 and won the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
*'' Ducks, Newburyport'' by Lucy Ellmann
Lucy Ellmann (born 18 October 1956) is an American-born British novelist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Biography
Her first book, '' Sweet Desserts'', won the Guardian Fiction Prize. She is the daughter of the American biographer and literary cr ...
, a finalist for the 2019 Booker Prize
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a Literary award, literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United King ...
, runs more than a thousand pages, mostly consisting of a single sentence that is 426,100 words long
* ''This Book Is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and Then Published'' (2020), by humor writer Dave Cowen, consists of one sentence that runs for 111,111 words, and is a stream of consciousness memoir
See also
* Longest word in English
The identity of the longest word in the English language 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 forme ...
* Longest words
The longest word in any given language depends on the word formation rules of each specific language, and on the types of words allowed for consideration.
Agglutinative languages allow for the creation of long words via compound (linguistics), ...
References
{{reflist
English grammar
Sentence
Sentence
Literature records