the Marks & Spencer Family seems to be similarily large (and may I say: successful)
I’ve remarked in the past that when driving country roads in hilly terrain you’ll often come upon a cut through a slope where they filled the surrounding lower areas with the removed dirt so the road runs closer to flat.
Every one of those cuts has a “Do Not Pass” sign. All named after the famed Colonel DoNot who was an itinerant roads engineer in the late 1800s. And a raging egomaniac.
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
I used to be able to trot that out to “impress” my nerdy friends. As it happens, it took a long time before I got laid.
It is a disease affecting the lungs of miners (predominantly coal miners). It is apparently the longest word in English. While I can I identify with antidisesestablishmentalrialists, in many ways, in the eyes of the establishment, via the Oxford Dictionary, they have lost the battle.
This, unfortunately, is the second longest word.
I loved the fact that dentists all over Indonesia used a large molar tooth as the “universal” symbol for “dentist”.
I am grateful I never needed their medical care.
Hey, this is one of the very few instances where the English word is longer than the German translation! In German, it’s just “Staublunge”, which means “dust lung”.
Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung
Oh, Germany. Oh, how you have failed us linguists.
In English the common term for coal miners’ occupational malady is “Black Lung”.
Medics might have a fancier Latinate technical term, but they have a fancy word for everything. For legit reasons of course, but it’s still a topic of humor.
More completely, @scudsucker’s neato word is in fact a joke perpetrated on puzzlers, not a legit medical term:
And in any case is meant to apply to a type of miner’s occupational disease having nothing to do with coal mining. With a few extra unneeded syllables thrown in just to stretch it out.
I would post the full name of the protein “titin”, but it would probably break the board.
Which is but the teeniest start on spelling out the contents of one strand of DNA, much less all the varieties available in a single person.
OTOH, you can print a copy of War and Peace with all the spaces and punctuation squeezed out. Arguably it means the same as a more conventional printing. But it’s a lot harder to read. And when you get all done with that million-character “word”, its definition is still “The novel War and Peace”.
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze …
(us “germans” coming out of our holes)
At only four letters long? That’s weird.
As a kid who loved looking at maps, I was convinced Vicinity was some really large, important city and was frustrated that never could figure out where it was. You know, how Rand McNally atlases used to have the little inset maps; Chicago and vicinity, Indianapolis and Vicinity, etc.
It had to be a big town to be near all these different places, right?
It’s been renamed Springfield since you were a child.
In Dutch we get as far as Hottentottententententoonstellingsterrein. And of course my medical background gives me the sternocleidomastoid muscle. I’ve learned the Black Lung/Staublung/stoflong in Dutch as pneumoconiosis. I like the new one 
Tell me more about the Hottentotten … (which seems to be a historic reference to one of Africas Tribes/nations, which sounds oddly familiar, in a 1870ies kind of way, how “wilds” were portrayed).
There is even a limerick somewhat famous in my youth:
(there is a sector/metro station in Vienna, quite known: Schottentor)
the limerick goes:
Der Friseur am Schottentor,
der stets die Hottentotten schor …
Well, I don’t know much about the ethnicity as such, but I do know that the people who used to be called “Hottentotten” in Dutch and German speaking countries are a people in what is now South Africa. The Dutch colonists gave them the name because it mocks their way of speech, which was unfamiliar and strange to them. So it’s a racist and demeaning moniker that shouldn’t be used anymore.
For an example of how offensive it is, here’s a German saying I remember from my youth in the 70s: When someone entered an untidy and disheveled room or other place, maybe a parent a child’s room, they would say:
“Hier sieht’s ja aus wie bei den Hottentotten!”
“It looks like at the Hottentots in here”
So, very bad, and very racist.
Yep. It’s very old and very racist and you’re right. We haven’t even made the effort to think up a new non-racist one in the meantime. I don’t think it’s still being used, so there’s that. At least I’m already in the right thread. I realized it wasn’t a really nice term, I didn’t realize it was that offensive. More like Indian instead of native American. I sincerely apologize. And will refrain from using the term in the future.