Polish
Longest Polish words are adjectives created from numerals and nouns.
Dziewięćsetdziewięćdziesięciodziewięcionarodowościowego, 54 letters, is an inclined genitive form of word, meaning roughly "of nine-hundred and ninety-nine nationalities".
Similar words are rather artificial compounds, constructed within allowed grammar rules, but are seldom used in spoken language, although they are not nonsense words. It's possible to make even longer words that way, for example:
Dziewięćsetdziewięćdziesiątdziewięćmiliardówdzięwiećsetdziewiędziesiątdziewięćmilionówdziewięćsetdziewięsiątdziewięćtysięcydziewięćsetdziewiędździesięciodziewięcioletni (168 letters, meaning "999,999,999,999 years old").
One of the longest common words is 31-letter dziewięćdziesięciokilkuletniemu – a form of "ninety-and-some years old one". Another ones are Konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka (32 letters) – an old-fashioned word for an unmarried daughter of a man from of Constantinople and pięćdziesięciogroszówka (23 letters) – "a 50 groszy coin".
Read more about this topic: Longest Words
Famous quotes containing the word polish:
“‘Then I polish all the silver, which a supper-table lacquers;
Then I write the pretty mottoes which you find inside the
crackers’—”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)