This article describes some of the longest words in the Spanish language.
Esternocleidooccipitomastoideos (31 letters) is the plural of the noun esternocleidooccipitomastoideo , which is the sternocleidomastoid, a muscle in the human neck. [1] The word has a 22-letter synonym: esternocleidomastoideo , [2] [3] [4] which is shorter because it omits the Latin prefix occipito- ('occipital'). [5] Both words are abbreviated as ECOM. [4]
The 24-letter word electroencefalografistas, plural of electroencefalografista , means 'electroencephalographists' or 'electroencephalographers': specialists in the brain measurement technology of electroencephalography (EEG). [3] [6]
The 23-letter adverb anticonstitucionalmente means 'anticonstitutionally'. [7] Anticonstitucionalmente is also the Portuguese translation; the French translation, anticonstitutionnellement , is an exceptionally long word as well (25 letters). [7]
In the table below, all of the Spanish nouns except for arteriosclerosis can be pluralised by adding an s (es for internacionalizaciones) to the end. The adjective otorrinolaringológico can also be pluralised with an s; the plurals of the other adjectives end in es.
The RAE column indicates whether the Real Academia Española lists and defines the word in the Diccionario de la lengua española , its official dictionary.
Spanish or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million when including second language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.
The Royal Spanish Academy is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanophone nations through the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
Catalan grammar, the morphology and syntax of the Catalan language, is similar to the grammar of most other Romance languages. Catalan is a relatively synthetic, fusional language..
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings; such a word is also known as an antagonym, autoantonym, contranym, or Janus word. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, enantionymy, antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for person, number, gender, and a very reduced case system; the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.
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.
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic environments. There is also regional variation in the use of pronouns, particularly the use of the informal second-person singular vos and the informal second-person plural vosotros.
The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. All nouns have a conventional grammatical gender. Countable nouns inflect for number. However, the division between uncountable and countable nouns is more ambiguous than in English.
Spanish adjectives are similar to those in most other Indo-European languages. They are generally postpositive, and they agree in both gender and number with the noun they modify.
The Spanish language employs a wide range of swear words that vary between Spanish speaking nations and in regions and subcultures of each nation. Idiomatic expressions, particularly profanity, are not always directly translatable into other languages, and so most of the English translations offered in this article are very rough and most likely do not reflect the full meaning of the expression they intend to translate.[c]
Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩⟨¡⟩.
Asturian, is a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Principality of Asturias, Spain. Asturian is part of a wider linguistic group, the Asturleonese languages. The number of speakers is estimated at 100,000 (native) and 450,000. The dialects of the Astur-Leonese language family are traditionally classified in three groups: Western, Central, and Eastern. For historical and demographic reasons, the standard is based on Central Asturian. Asturian has a distinct grammar, dictionary, and orthography. It is regulated by the Academy of the Asturian Language. Although it is not an official language of Spain it is protected under the Statute of Autonomy of Asturias and is an elective language in schools. For much of its history, the language has been ignored or "subjected to repeated challenges to its status as a language variety" due to its lack of official status.
Portuguese and Spanish, although closely related Romance languages, differ in many aspects of their phonology, grammar, and lexicon. Both belong to a subset of the Romance languages known as West Iberian Romance, which also includes several other languages or dialects with fewer speakers, all of which are mutually intelligible to some degree. A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages : In the case of Spanish it was 20%, the third closest Romance language to Latin, only behind Sardinian and Italian. Portuguese was 31%, making it the second furthest language from Latin after French.
The Diccionario de la lengua española is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. It was first published in 1780, as the Diccionario de la lengua castellana and subsequent editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014; it is available on-line, incorporating modifications to be included in the twenty-fourth print edition.
The FundéuRAE is a non-profit organization founded in 2005 in Madrid, Spain. The foundation was created in collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), an institution that standardizes the use of Spanish, and Agencia EFE's Department of Urgent Spanish.
Feminist language reform has proposed gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish. Grammatical gender in Spanish refers to how Spanish nouns are categorized as either masculine or feminine. As in other Romance languages—such as Portuguese, to which Spanish is very similar—a group of both men and women, or someone of unknown gender, is usually referred to by the masculine form of a noun and/or pronoun. Advocates of gender-neutral language modification consider this to be sexist, and exclusive of gender non-conforming people. They also stress the underlying sexism of words whose feminine form has a different, often less prestigious meaning. Some argue that a gender neutral Spanish can reduce gender stereotyping, deconstructing sexist gender roles and discrimination in the workplace.
Below are two estimates of the most common words in Modern Spanish. Each estimate comes from an analysis of a different text corpus. A text corpus is a large collection of samples of written and/or spoken language, that has been carefully prepared for linguistic analysis. To determine which words are the most common, researchers create a database of all the words found in the corpus, and categorise them based on the context in which they are used.
Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.
This article lists some of the longest words in the French language.
Elle is a proposed non-normative personal pronoun in Spanish intended as a grammatically ungendered alternative to the third-person gender-specific pronouns él ("he"), ella ("she") and ello ("it").
