Bedtime Facts (147/365)

The longest palindrome of the world exists in the Finnish language

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According to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest palindrome in the world is saippuakivikauppias. The word is somewhat artificial but plausible and it means a dealer in lye or caustic soda. There are 19 letters in saippuakivikauppias.

Finnish works well in palindrome construction because it is a synthetic language that uses a lot of affixes attached to word stems. That makes for a lot of long words. But when it comes to the longest words found in a dictionary, German takes the cake. Take a look at the monster below:

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

Let that sink in for a while.

It means a law that governs the transfer of beef labeling supervision tasks.